US consumers are still spending, but JPMorgan says the cushion against higher prices is thinning

The US consumer is holding up, but JPMorgan’s Marianne Lake says the forces that have propped up American households might be eroding.

Lake, who is CEO of JPMorgan’s sprawling consumer and community bank, said on Tuesday that the nation’s biggest bank still sees a healthy consumer across a range of metrics, including credit card spending, debt servicing, and deposit balances.

But she also offered some warning for the second half of the year.

“As we sit here today, the consumer is resilient, the metrics are good, everything looks fine,” Lake said at an investor conference. “But there are an increasing — small but nevertheless increasing — number of people for whom wage inflation is not currently keeping pace with inflation, and that will likely be the thing to watch.”

Unemployment remains low, but demand for labor is softer, Lake said. As energy prices surged in April, consumers saw their inflation-adjusted income or real wages fall. However, many were able to cover some of the higher costs with extra cash from their lower tax bills.

“It’s possible that if inflation were to be higher for longer, that this sort of trend of wages keeping up with inflation could be … at some risk,” said Lake, adding that consumers spent approximately 20%-25% of their tax savings since March.

Lake’s comments come as bank executives have repeatedly praised a surprisingly resilient US economy that has continued to avoid a sharp pullback thanks to low unemployment, steady spending, and better-than-expected consumer credit quality.

Wells Fargo’s CFO Mike Santomassimo offered a similar assessment earlier Tuesday morning, saying his bank is seeing “very good activity levels” across its businesses with little change in consumer behavior over the last few quarters.

“People, probably, are maybe overusing this word resilient, but it has been very stable, very resilient,” Santomassimo said.

At Wells Fargo, credit card spending rose 9% in May from a year earlier, Santomassimo said. Some of that was driven by higher gas prices, which added nearly $1 billion of incremental spending. Consumers are spending roughly 45% to 50% more on gas than they were a few months ago, he said.

Santomassimo said that while lower-income consumers are “living a little more paycheck to paycheck,” those on the higher end with investments are still “doing quite well relative to history.”

David Hollerith is a senior reporter at Yahoo Finance covering the cryptocurrency and stock markets. Follow him on X at @DsHollers.