Target CEO Brian Cornell says shoppers are pulling back, even on groceries, as they feel stressed about their budgets.
In an interview with CNBC’s Becky Quick that aired Thursday morning, he emphasized that the retailer has posted seven consecutive quarters of declining sales of discretionary items, such as apparel and toys, in terms of both dollars and units.
“But even in food and beverage categories, over the last few quarters, the units, the number of items they’re buying, has been declining,” he said in the interview.
Covid caused a recession, and by definition (GDP line go down), we have not been in a recession since the post-covid rebound. We have inflation because covid messed up our supply chains and aggregate demand is higher than it was pre-covid. People have money and they’re spending it, unemployment is as low as it’s ever been. The economy is white hot. The whole point of raising interest rates is to artificially lower demand so that prices can stabilize. If the fed doesn’t stop raising interest rates at exactly the right time, demand dips too low, people start losing their jobs, and we end up in a recession.
Precisely. Inflation is near benchmark, but we’re not there yet. Most pricing indicators are cooling off, so the Fed will likely stop raising rates soon.
Imo (and I said this at the time), the Fed should’ve started raising rates long before COVID happened. The economy was on a tear, but borrowing was way too high and things like housing were way too cheap. So we should’ve started raising rates back in 2016 or so, as well as cutting back Federal spending, but instead we passed tax cuts and spent more.
Heh, remember when Trump railed against the Fed raising interest rates during his presidency? What a dummy.