I’ll be filling in on Mark Halperin’s Morning Meeting this morning, which you can check out here at 9:00 am ET:
Yesterday, Philip sent me two stories of two numbers that arrived at the same time that together paint a picture of America’s present state of mind.
The first: the personal savings rate rose to 3 percent in July, up from 2.6 percent in June. Heather Long, the chief economist at Navy Federal Credit Union, 𝕏flagged it. Three percent is one of the lowest savings rates in American history. The only times we have been lower were right before the Great Recession and during the revenge spending binge of 2022. There is no cushion. For a lot of families there is nothing standing behind the paycheck at all.
The second ran in Bloomberg that same morning. Crafts and hobbies are now taking a record share of American goods consumption, beating even the pandemic high. Sporting goods, hobby, musical instrument, and bookstore sales rose 10 percent in July. PNC’s data shows hobby spending growing year over year every month since April of 2025, and it is not one generation. It is Gen Z. It is boomers. It is everybody in the middle.
Bloomberg went and found the actual people. A 62 year old retired nanny in Queens surrounded by alphabet beads and yarn, putting more than $1,000 a year into trinkets she gives away at concerts. A 25 year old publicist spending $300 a month on stickers and stationery clubs. A 25 year old raised by Chinese immigrants to be frugal, who bought a $217 knitting needle kit and said, in the past I was frugal, not now. An accountant in College Park with a $650 Callaway driver and a $300 launch monitor, hitting into a net in his backyard.
That last guy and I could be friends. Nobody in the story is a villain. They’re just ordinary Americans going about an ordinary existence and putting hobbies today ahead of saving for tomorrow.
The woman in Queens buys fewer kinds of fruit and cheese and canceled the gym for YouTube videos. The publicist pulled back on restaurants and live entertainment. They are not choosing hobbies over other spending. They are choosing today over tomorrow, and they never have to say so out loud.
That is the thread tying all of it together, and I doubt most of them could name it. It is fatalism. Somewhere in the American subconscious a switch got flipped during COVID and never got flipped back. We stopped believing in tomorrow, so we spend today, because who knows. Delayed gratification is gone, because delayed gratification is a bet on a future you have to believe in first.
I am terrible at this. If I want something and I have the money, I buy it. I am terrible about saving extra right now. It is that season of life with college and private school tuition and car payments, etc. My delay is not gratification, but the Dave Ramsey system. A friend who manages money for a living tells me most of his clients do not save seriously until fifty five or fifty six because of kids and college, and I took enormous comfort in that, which is exactly the problem. I found a way to feel fine about it.
