Welcome to Thoughts on the Market.

I'm Ellen Zettner, Chief U.S. Economist for Morgan Stanley Research.

And I'm Sarah Wolf, also on Morgan Stanley's U.S. economics team.

And on this episode of the podcast, we'll be talking the economic health of U.S. households

amid COVID uncertainty and expiring pandemic relief programs.

It's Thursday, July 22nd, at 9 a.m. in New York.

So Sarah, we saw peak economic growth in the second quarter of this year.

We're currently tracking nearly 12% GDP for the second quarter with consumption at 11%.

That's just eye-popping numbers.

We're currently forecasting that speed of growth will slow, but I wanted you to talk to our

listeners to give them a snapshot of the consumer data behind that forecast.

Great.

Thank you, Ellen.

There are a lot of cross-currents happening right now for the U.S. consumer.

We have a bulk of the household stimulus programs, including the economic impact payments

and the elevated unemployment insurance benefits that are fading will no longer be receiving

any more economic impact payments than that was a really important boost to income and

spending as we moved into 2021.

Nonetheless, we are getting more and more income growth from job gains altogether, though.

We do expect that spending will remain robust over the next year and a half and a large

part of this is as a result of the excess savings stock that's been built up since the

beginning of the pandemic.

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