“The story within the story was the resurrection of the American consumer who lifted his/her spending at a 4.4% annual rate. This is the strongest gain since the first quarter of 2006, when credit was flowing freely, unemployment of 4.5% was triggering sizeable organic wage growth and rallies in both equities and housing were generating personal wealth, at least on paper. It would be a bit dangerous to extrapolate what we just saw in the fourth quarter because the QE2 juice squeezed by Uncle Ben generated a sizeable wealth effect that helped pull down the savings rate from 5.9% in the third quarter to 5.4% in the fourth (it should NOT be lost on anyone that real consumer spending at +4.4% growth managed to more than double the comparatively sluggish 1.8% annualized increase in real disposable income). Strip out this non-recurring factor and real GDP growth would have come in closer to a ho-hum 2.8% annual rate last quarter. That actually is not really that impressive for a sixth quarter of post-recession recovery, when real GDP growth is typically chugging along at roughly ......
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