The Consumer Crossroads: What Calisade’s Latest Analysis Reveals About U.S. Household Strength
Calisade is an investment research firm that offers bespoke investment research to institutional clients. It also delivers weekly insights to the retail market via its Calisade Digests. Calisade focuses on creating alpha through robust macro, fundamental, technical, and sentiment research.
Introduction
This week’s Calisade Digest was entitled “The Consumer Crossroads: Surface Resilience, Rising Risks.” Its focus was on the health of the American consumer. The Q&A that follows between the Calisade Marketing and Research teams explains why the Calisade research team turned its attention to the topic at this time. It also delves into what readers of the Basic (free) digest can expect, as well as what more those who subscribe to paid editions (Premium and Elite) can expect.
Why is it that the Calisade Research team decided to focus on the health of the consumer as its topic of interest this week?
It’s often said that the United States is a consumer economy. That’s because it is in fact, true. Household spending remains the engine of U.S. economic activity, with personal consumption expenditures accounting for 68.2% of nominal GDP in Q2 2025.
Recent market commentary – including past Calisade digests – have noted that while the American economy continues to log impressive GDP growth on the back of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) boom, the composition of demand is becoming increasingly uneven. This digest seeks to explore the extent to which that unevenness is actually a potential problem, and if so, to what extent.
What will I learn in this week’s Basic Digest?
As always, the Basic Digest seeks to provide an education to readers that are toward the beginning of their investing journey. In that spirit, this week’s digest gives an overview of how consumer spending drives economic growth in the U.S. and why changes in household demand influence broader market conditions. It explains how spending differs across income groups; showing that higher-income households support much of the demand for services like travel, education, recreation, and healthcare, while lower-income households spend more on essentials such as rent, fuel, food, and transportation. The digest also highlights the key forces that shape spending behavior, including confidence, wages, prices, and borrowing costs, and introduces the main indicators used to assess consumer health.
What extra insights do Premium Digest subscribers get?
Premium subscribers dive deeper into the makeup of U.S. consumption rather than just the headline story. We break down how spending is distributed across services, nondurable goods, and highly rate-sensitive durable categories and why services have become the dominant driver of demand, reaching $10.91 trillion in August 2025 (chained 2017 dollars) as households spend more on healthcare, travel, education, and financial services.
The digest also explores how spending is concentrated at the top of the income distribution, with the top 10% accounting for roughly 49.2% of U.S. consumer spending, while lower-income groups allocate most of their budgets to essentials such as housing, food, transportation, and energy. This segmentation helps explain why headline spending can look strong even when more vulnerable households face pressure.
What does Elite Digest offer that the other tiers do not?
Elite subscribers gain access to a full analytical dashboard of consumer health, covering sentiment surveys, spending flows, labor trends, delinquency metrics, credit conditions, and rate-sensitive categories like autos and housing. Instead of explaining how consumption behaves in theory, the Elite Digest shows how these indicators are evolving in real time and what they imply for turning points in the economic cycle.
Recent data shows that consumer mood and credit stress are diverging from headline spending, with weaker sentiment readings and rising strain among financially sensitive households. The Elite dashboard contextualizes these shifts and helps subscribers identify where demand is strengthening and where pressure is building before it shows up in official reports.
For those interested in learning more, where should they go?
Sign up for the basic digest here.
Review a comparison of the different paid digest options here.Conclusion
Consumer spending has helped carry the U.S. economy through a high-rate environment, but the forces behind that strength are becoming more uneven. Higher-income households continue to support services demand, while more financially sensitive groups are showing early signs of strain in credit, sentiment, and rate-exposed categories. For investors, the key is separating headline resilience from the underlying shifts that often signal turning points before they appear in official data.
This week’s Q&A aims to provide that clarity helping readers distinguish cyclical noise from structural trends, see where demand is firming or weakening, and identify the indicators that matter most as the cycle matures. Calisade will continue tracking these developments in real time to help investors position with greater accuracy and confidence.
Interested in going deeper on the above topics? Our FREE Basic Digest provides 3-5 pages of summarized insights to keep you informed on key themes impacting the market.
Or consider leveling up to our paid Premium Digest. Typically running 15-20 pages long, the Premium Digest goes much deeper on a given theme, expanding on historical precedents and providing a bit of visibility into Calisade's institutional insider trading research.
Calisade's Elite Digest is our institutional grade offering, typically 25-35 pages chock full of charts, graphs, historical insights, and, perhaps most importantly, stock tickers that are directly impacted by these themes.
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