From August 26, 2026, to September 3, 2026, the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), an agency under the Department of Commerce, released new results for its principal economic indicators in personal income and international trade, while revising its reports for April through June’s GDP and corporate profits.
This comes at a time when the original forecasts were updated to better reflect the reality in the second economic quarter, where consumer spending, exports, and business investments were heavily offset by an increase in imports and a decrease in government spending, causing the economy to have slower-than-expected growth compared to the first quarter.
Consumer spending rose due to a combination of factors, as the rate of consumer spending increased by 5.8 percentage points in the second quarter, which is a 0.1 percent increase from the estimated increases. However, the amount of spending where expenditures are heading varies widely in the economy, as personal consumption expenditures (PCE) with food and energy surpassed its 2026 quarter one reports by 0.8 percent.
Looking at the economic indicators for trade, the American trade deficit, one of the major indicators that the Trump administration has attempted to reduce, has increased by $17.4 billion from June 2026. This has primarily been caused by an increase in demand for semiconductors to speed up the development of artificial intelligence and to continue the building of data centers across the country. At the same time, there has been a reduction in crude oil exports to keep home prices low, while the global oil market faces uncertainty concerning the conflict in the Middle East and North Africa.
So what does this mean for the everyday consumer? For starters, although consumer spending is increasing, it doesn’t mean that it’s split evenly between goods and services. In fact, when looking at changes in monthly consumer spending, the overall increase of $36.3 billion in spending was offset by a hefty $49.9 billion decrease in spending on goods, with only “other durable goods” (other goods that do not fit into BEA’s explicit categories of ‘durable goods’) being the only goods that have seen any relative increase in spending within the month. Moreover, the increase in spending in services doesn’t necessarily mean that more people are expanding the amount of services they pay for; it’s relatively the opposite, with an economic response where people are paying more for services than they did months or even years ago, primarily in financial services and healthcare. Ultimately, with the interest in buying goods falling, the need to pay for more expensive services, and concerns about the future of the trade deficit, there is still a long way to go for a majority of Americans to hold a positive attitude towards the economy, a result not seen since January 2020.
