The former economic council director Larry Lindsey gave an analysis of May's core PCE report, arguing that there are several signs that America is currently in a recession.
LARRY LINDSEY: We're going to have inventory decline that's going to contribute to a negative second half, which already is going to have weak consumption. If I may, we neglect CPI, and we shouldn't.
For a typical four-person family with a median for person family income, 90 percent of their raise has gone to food and gasoline prices, which has gone up in the last 12 months. That doesn't leave very much left over for everything else, and it also means that those other things went up in price as well. It seems to us that it is quite hard for the consumer to keep marching forward.