Jared Bernstein: Consumer Spending Is Quite Considerable Concern

EXCERPT:

BERNSTEIN: “One place where I'm seeing it is really a quite considerable concern, and that's consumer spending. Consumer spending has actually been quite flat for four or five months now. Now, this is 70 percent of our economy and it's been driving this expansion. Let me tell you, when I was in the White House chairing the CEA, we were scrutinizing everything we could because we knew that the consumer, the strong American consumer, being driven, by the way, by a tight labor market with rising real wages pushing this economy forward. We're now seeing cracks in the job market. Hiring rates are down. We'll know in a few hours, by the way, what that looked like in June.”