The result is a murky outlook: markets are betting on rate cuts in the coming months, yet the Fed signals it might delay cutting beyond September if inflation doesn’t convincingly slow. In short, uncertainty reigns. Both investors and policymakers are craving clearer insight into where the economy is headed – especially regarding consumer demand, which makes up two-thirds of GDP and will heavily influence the Fed’s next moves.
One challenge in this environment is that our go-to economic indicators are rear-view mirrors. Metrics like Gross Domestic Product (GDP), Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE), and Consumer Price Index (CPI) arrive with significant time lags and revisions. These indicators are invaluable for their accuracy and comprehensiveness, but in a fast-changing or uncertain climate, they often confirm the story only after the fact.
For example, CPI inflation figures are published monthly, but even they can mask real-time shifts – parts of the CPI (like owner’s equivalent rent) are inherently lagged, reflecting contracts signed months prior. Similarly, official consumer spending reports and retail sales data land weeks after the consumer transactions occur.
During the pandemic, economists turned to daily credit card swipes, mobility trackers, and online prices to gauge the economy’s pulse in real time. Today’s backdrop of Fed indecision and mixed economic signals once again amplifies the demand for forward-looking intelligence. If traditional indicators are looking in the rear-view mirror, decision-makers need a better windshield. They need timely, granular indicators that can illuminate where consumer demand and inflation are heading before the official reports hit.
This is where real-time consumer spend streams come into play. One leading example is our decision-intelligence platform that captures and analyzes consumer economic activity in near real time. Unlike traditional economic data, AnthologyAI's data is born digital, collected directly from consenting individuals’ actual transactions and activities.
Through our proprietary, consent-based mobile apps, AnthologyAI ethically sources first-party data – users opt in to share anonymized information from their spending, banking, travel, and other digital footprints. This ethical, compliance-by-design approach means the data is both rich and responsibly gathered.
Our platform ingests an enormous volume of consumer signals in real time – over 100 million new consumer data points per day across domains like retail purchases, e-commerce, ride-sharing, financial transactions, media streaming, travel bookings, and geolocation.
AnthologyAI provides engineered indices and metrics that distill this data into decision-useful insights. Users can access both granular row-level data (for custom analysis) and aggregated indicators that are ready to plug into models.
Key streams include:
These indices are updated continuously, enabling a real-time dashboard of consumer behavior that avoids the bias and latency of surveys or panels.
Armed with these real-time consumer indices, analysts can detect turning points in the economy well before the official “macro” prints arrive. This kind of macro decision-intelligence is invaluable during Fed uncertainty, as it shines a light on the very questions the Fed is pondering.
In healthy times, discretionary spending grows at least as fast as essential spending. But when households grow nervous, discretionary splurges are the first to go. AnthologyAI’s real-time discretionary spending index provides an early read on these shifts.
If discretionary demand is falling while essentials are flat or rising (perhaps due to inflation on basics), it paints a picture of consumers becoming more cautious – a dynamic that might precede an official downturn. A sudden discretionary spending pullback in AnthologyAI’s index could forecast a drop in consumer confidence or retail sales well before official reports catch up.
Travel spending is highly discretionary and timing-sensitive. AnthologyAI’s travel dataset captures bookings and expenditures on flights, hotels, and other tourism activities. If travel bookings exceed last year’s, it signals consumers feel secure in their income prospects.
Conversely, if the travel index plummets or fails to rise seasonally, it’s a red flag that consumers are cutting back. Because AnthologyAI’s data updates continuously, an investor could see, for instance, a mid-season drop in hotel bookings as it happens.
AnthologyAI’s decision intelligence models can predict important macro variables like inflation and consumer confidence ahead of official reports by analyzing these real-time patterns.
In periods of Fed uncertainty and shifting economic undercurrents, the ability to see changes as they unfold is a game-changer. Traditional reports will always be fundamental, but they are no longer sufficient on their own.
Forward-looking professionals in financial services – from institutional investors to risk managers – stand to gain a significant edge by incorporating real-time consumer signals into their models. These high-frequency insights act as an early-warning system for macro risk, allowing anticipation of inflection points before they become headlines.
The case for such integration is clear. Financial institutions and economists should blend these new signals with traditional analysis. AnthologyAI delivers these insights via cloud platforms and APIs, enabling seamless integration.
By tapping into ethically sourced, real-time consumer spend streams, we can transform granular data into macro-level decision intelligence – empowering investors, economists, and policymakers to move faster, smarter, and with greater foresight.
