…and I’m sure you have too. So while the rest of Virginia is still in a food coma, enjoy some counter-narrative on how Black Friday was. indeed, the biggest ever according to POLITICO:
Buyers spent $11.4 billion at retail stores and malls, up nearly $1 billion from last year, according to a report released Saturday by ShopperTrak. It was the largest amount ever spent on the day that marks the beginning of the holiday shopping season, and the biggest year-over-year increase since 2007. Chicago-based ShopperTrak gathers data from 25,000 outlets across the U.S., including individual stores and shopping centers.
Online shopping was strong as well, with a 24.3 percent increase in online spending on Black Friday, according to IBM, which tracks sales at 500 online retailers.
Between healthy applications of food product, essentially pepper spray and a 24.3% increase of online sales, this moderately proves an earlier hypothesis to be true — Americans in 2007 were by-and-large caught in a personal credit crunch.
As those pressures begin to ease up as we arrive in year 5 of the credit crisis, American exports are up, the euro is down, China continues to seek safe harbors for its excess capital in stable U.S. dollars, and best of all — all that personal credit is starting to get paid down (or in many cases, paid off).
In other words, Americans are starting to spend again.
Now should the euro indeed ‘asplode (yes, a technical term connoting both irrationality and explosions with fireballs), European capital will quickly seek a safe haven to cozy up to all that Chinese and Japanese debt. Which means our Congress — fumbling as it is with a budget fix and faced with a strengthening dollar — will embark on a genius round of QE3.
Short version being, we’re gonna print some money like it’s 2009!
Now whether we’re ready for the long term inflationary pressures, or whether we’re just going to let some combination of a strengthening dollar plus a strengthening economy plus qualitative easing v3.0 somehow just magically resolve itself (Fed interest hikes?) without looking at the financial system writ large is a bridge too far. At least for the moment it is.
Or the total opposite could happen, France could suffer the fate of the PIIGS, take Germany with it, and then the entire world financial markets are screwed. Should that happen… well, you don’t want to think about that.
Still, for all this being said and done, it would seem as if the average American’s savings binge (or credit payoff binge) is starting to abate. More liquidity equals more jobs, more credit extended, and more speculation into emerging technology and businesses.
Hopefully this time, a generation has learned the lessons of cheap credit and how it can both dramatically improve and simultaneously wreck an economy.
Fear the boom, not the bust… but for the moment, enjoy what may be the first green shoots of an economic recovery.
