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.
On YouTube
On Spotify
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