Cracking Consumer
The podcast you do not want to miss
The savings rate just hit 2.6%. Disposable income dropped for the second straight month. And somewhere under all the tariff headlines, a quiet shift in American family life is telling us something the Wall Street Journal got almost entirely wrong.
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This week, Dr. A and Jack work through three data points that don’t look related on the surface:
Falling savings, rising childcare costs, and fathers quietly cutting their work hours
Those stories share a common thread. The consumer is still spending, but they’re running out of room to do it.
Plus: Dr. A’s take on higher education’s real problem. It’s not AI. It’s that faculty stopped explaining what they actually do.
02:00 — The personal savings rate: what it is, why it matters right now, and why Abdullah has been watching it
04:30 — Credit card debt, delinquency rates, and how much longer the consumer can hold this up
09:47 — The Wall Street Journal’s childcare piece — and why Abdullah thinks they gave men too much credit
12:00 — The real driver: childcare costs are reshaping labor force participation, not culture
19:15 — Stock market reality check: what’s holding the positive numbers up, and why Abdullah is personally preparing for Q3/Q4 weakness
24:00 — What students should do differently right now (and why office hours are underrated)
From Last Week
I received several requests to remove the paywall from this paid-subscriber post. So here it is if you missed it last week.
It will be interesting to see how the savings rate shake out for the remainder of the year
I've found myself hyperfixated on my finances over the past few months, largely because I saw my savings account slowly dwindle over the second half of last year.