Key Points: There are a lot of crosscurrents affecting the consumer. The bear case is built on weak job growth, slowing wages, elevated oil prices, and risks associated with AI. The bull case hinges on stimulus, an uptick in manufacturing, and a steadily declining savings rate. The data are decidedly mixed, so the glass is either half full or half empty. We’ve been in the glass-is-half-empty camp for the past year, but our analysis of

Key Points: The job market, housing and autos share a common thread – they seem to be going nowhere fast. Turnover in the job market is among the lowest on record, home sales per capita are lower than they were in the GFC, and the SAAR per licensed driver has been going downhill. Our last two reports covered employment and housing. This one sifts through a ton of data to understand where the auto sector

Key Points: The housing market has been scraping along the bottom for some time. We would’ve expected the combination of lower rates and pent-up demand to have added some vigor to the market by now, but that’s not been the case. The question is where do we go from here? The path of rates is uncertain, so our objective is to frame the upside and downside scenarios. Overall, we think the risks are more skewed

Key Points: Up until recently, the AI debate has been centered on the tech sector, but some have recently begun to worry – er… panic – that AI will crush the consumer by weighing on aggregate demand. The arguments we’ve seen have been long on theory, but they’re devoid of math. This report offers a data-driven perspective on how AI is likely to affect aggregate demand. AI is likely to supercharge the shift from labor

Key Points: Consumer staples have had a strong start to the year, and we want to know if this is anything more than a dead cat bounce. In this report, we assess the appeal of consumer staples stocks from both a tactical and a fundamental perspective. After years of underperformance, valuations have compressed, but our analysis says that buying staples because they’re cheap isn’t a winning strategy. Figure 7 shows that investors are better off

Key Points: Companies tend to follow a predictable life cycle. The key is for them to act their age. We’ve seen far too many companies push for growth beyond their prime, and it rarely turns out well. There’s not a lot of green space left when it comes to the consumer arena, so it’s incumbent upon investors to make sure companies are aging gracefully. There’s no shame in getting old. Modest organic growth coupled with