Spending by older Americans is going toward higher-priced services like travel, health care and entertainment, thereby putting further upward pressure on those prices — and on inflation.Once or twice a year, she visits her two adult children in different states. She’s planning multiple other trips, including to a science fiction convention in Scotland and a Disney cruise soon after that, along with a trip next year to neolithic sites in Great Britain.
“I suddenly realized, with my dad getting old and my mom dying, it’s like, ‘No, you can’t take it with you,’ ” she said. “I could become incapacitated to the point where I couldn’t enjoy something like going to Scotland or going on a cruise. So I better do it, right?”and housing markets over the past several years, they are accounting for a larger share of consumer spending — the principal driver of economic growth — than ever before.— and on inflation.
As recently as March, the Fed’s policymakers had projected that they would cut their benchmark rate three times this year. Since then, though, inflation measures have remained uncomfortably high, partly a consequence of. Chair Jerome Powell made clear recently that the Fed isn’t confident enough that inflation is sustainably easing to cut rates.
Stock prices, as measured by the S&P 500 index, are about 72% higher than they were five years ago. Home values soared 58% from the end of 2018 through 2023, according to the Federal Reserve. The gains are hardly universal. The wealthiest one-tenth of Americans own two-thirds of all household wealth. Still, wealth for the median household — the midpoint between the richest and poorest — rose 37% from 2019 to 2022, the sharpest rise on record since the 1980s according to the Fed, to $193,000.