Danielle DiMartino Booth, Columnist

U.S. Households May Rue the Binge of 2017

Americans will soon find out they have been living beyond their means.

January 5, 2018 at 4:23 PM UTC

Danielle DiMartino Booth, a former adviser to the president of the Dallas Fed, is the author of "Fed Up: An Insider's Take on Why the Federal Reserve Is Bad for America," and founder of Quill Intelligence.

Buy in haste, repent at leisure.
Photographer: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

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Will 2018 be the year of the household hangover? The latest data on the saving rate, which broke under 3 percent to 2.9 percent in November, the lowest since 2007, suggest that an encore to the ebullient buying over the holidays will not happen in the new year.

Without a doubt, households are as buoyant as they’ve been in years. In the most recent consumer confidence report, only 15.2 percent of those surveyed reported jobs were “hard to get,” a 16-year low. The few economists who have forecast that the unemployment rate would fall below 4 percent are looking prescient.