The Southeast Entrepreneurship and Economic Development Symposium (SEEDS) returned to Cape Girardeau on Thursday, Nov. 14, bringing with it a slew of discussion on the national and regional economy. Charles Gascon, senior economist and research officer for the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, was one of several presenters at the conference. He provided a regional economic update, sharing statistics from various business markets and how they related to his Federal Reserve District. “The broad picture we’re looking at is pretty much the same: really strong growth coming out of the pandemic, a pretty rapid slowdown as we got into 2022 and then movement upward in the last couple of quarters with pretty steady growth in that 2% range,” he said. The St. Louis district covers Eastern Missouri, Western Kentucky and Tennessee, Southern Illinois and Indiana, Northern Mississippi and the entirety of Arkansas. Gascon said sentiment from his contacts within the district is more pessimistic than for the nation as a whole. “But at the same time, we have seen since the beginning of 2023, generally more and more of our (national) contacts are telling us that they see signs that things are getting better. They switch from pessimistic to neutral or going from neutral to optimistic,” he said. Consumption dropped off during the pandemic, Gascon said, with government payments providing more disposable income to increase consumption once it had subsided. “This is ultimately one of the big drivers of some of these inflationary pressures that we saw. Supply in the economy was constrained, we had a lot of supply chain disruptions, but at the same time consumers had a lot of money to spend, so with really strong demand we saw really strong consumption growth going forward,” he said. The households with the top 40% of income provide a major portion of consumption, with lower-income households having much less spending power. Many low-income households are now living paycheck-to-paycheck. Credit card delinquency rates rose across all income levels since the pandemic. “That’s very concerning for those low-to-moderate-income communities across the nation that the savings just (aren’t) there as opposed to a couple years ago. The excess savings have been depleted,” Gascon said. Retailers are increasingly reliant on discounts and incentives to get customers through their doors because so many of them are cautious about spending money nowadays, Gascon added.
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