Via Citigroup's Tobias Levkovich, citing the BLS's Consumer Expenditure Survey, h/t Daniel Gross at Slate: the top 20% of Americans by income exhibit greater consumer spending per year, on average, than those in the bottom three quintiles (the bottom 60%) combined. I know we've heard about the increasingly top-heavy distribution of income repeatedly (there's an interesting interactive graph that both illustrates and moderates this phenomenon). But I hadn't realized to what extent that translated into consumer expenditures. I think that the enormity of Walmart, through which 9% of all such money flows, made me believe that most consumer spending was driven by Americans with "ordinary" incomes.
Anyway, this statistic was very interesting to me, but I don't want to comment right now on its significance one way or another.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment