Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

The New York Times reports that Asian stock markets are down and the rest of the world is following:

“It’s almost an Asian flu that the markets caught today,” said Art Hogan, the chief markets analyst at Jeffries & Co. “Creeping into the conversation now is, when do we see top-line revenue growth? When is the consumer going to take over from government stimulus? But the answer is consumer data has been less than spectacular.”

Well, yeah.  That’s always been the problem.  Eventually, recovery has to be fueled by consumer demand, and it’s just not clear where that’s going to come from.  Rising middle class wages?  Nope.  More credit card borrowing?  Obviously not.  Drawing down savings?  Just the opposite is happening.  Tapping into home equity?  Forget it.  Neil Irwin sums things up in the Washington Post today:

“Credit fuels housing. It fuels consumer durable goods. It fuels business investment. It’s in every part of the economy,” said [Carmen] Reinhart, an economist at the University of Maryland. “Credit makes recessions after a financial crisis longer, and all the signs are that [it] is happening this time as well.”

A related head wind comes from American consumers. The financial crisis and recession are reversing a 30-year trend carrying Americans toward a high point in debt. The ratio of consumer debt to the nation’s total economic output rose to 97 percent in the first quarter of this year from 45 percent in 1975.

Currently, Americans are saving more and paying down debt; the savings rate was 1.2 percent of disposable income in early 2008. By the second quarter of this year, that rose to 5.2 percent.

“The household sector has never been so stressed,” said RGE Monitor Chairman Nouriel Roubini, who predicted the crisis and recession. “Savings has to go much higher, and that is going to slow growth of consumption even once incomes start growing.”

Every dollar that Americans save is one fewer dollar for consumption, which means less economic output. When the savings rate goes up by a percentage point, spending decreases by more than $100 billion, according to the McKinsey Global Institute.

My Netroots Nation panelists might have all broken my heart by not opposing the reappointment of Ben Bernanke, but they were also unanimous in calling for a second stimulus.  Politically, that’s not in the cards right now, and I think it’s defensible to suggest that we wait for the current stimulus to really kick in before considering a new one anyway.  Still, even if the worst is over, no one has been able to point to a mechanism that will cause consumer demand to grow significantly over the next few years, and without that we have a very long, very swampy slog ahead of us.  Until the debt overhang goes away and middle class incomes start to rise, the U.S. economy is going to stay fragile and vulnerable to shocks.  It’s hard to see much of a silver lining here.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate