Visa Sees 10% Spending Growth, BofA Agrees: Is the Consumer Fine?

Here is the awkward truth about the American consumer right now: the scoreboard says they are winning, but the vibes say they are losing, and both sides have receipts.

Visa reported that spending on its network, which covers roughly $7 trillion in annual US transactions, accelerated to 10% year-over-year growth last quarter, up from the 6-8% range of the prior 18 months. Growth was described as broad-based across income segments and both discretionary and non-discretionary categories. Meanwhile, Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan told Jim Cramer that August consumer spending came in 4% above last August, with prior-quarter growth at 5%. Charge-off rates and delinquency levels are sitting at multi-year lows. On paper, this consumer is fine. Great, even.

Then you open YouTube and a 30-year butcher is explaining that ground beef went from $2.99 to $8.49 per pound, customers are buying groceries on credit cards and making minimum payments, and people have quietly stopped buying steak altogether. Andrei Jikh is calling the official inflation data fundamentally broken. The comment sections are not exactly writing thank-you notes to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The disconnect is real and it matters. Moynihan's point that headline credit card balances are misleading because the economy is 40% larger than pre-COVID is technically correct. But try telling someone paying $8.49 for ground beef that their debt is fine on a size-adjusted basis. The official data and the lived experience have drifted far enough apart that even Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins claiming egg prices are down nearly 50% at retail got met with immediate skepticism from the same audiences watching oil inch toward $100 a barrel and diesel sitting above $5.90 per gallon nationally.

That energy number is the wildcard underneath all of it. $100 Brent crude is not a consumer-sentiment abstraction. It shows up at the pump, in shipping costs, in food prices, and in the headline CPI print that the Fed is watching. Bank of America's rosy consumer data was collected before oil fully breached triple digits. The next read could look very different.

The bull case on the US consumer is backed by hard institutional data from two of the largest financial networks on earth. The bear case is backed by every grocery run anyone has taken in the last two years. The market is pricing in cautious optimism. The comment sections are pricing in chaos. One of them is going to be right, and the answer probably arrives with the next CPI print on September 16th.

If the number surprises hot, the guy who switched from ribeye to ground beef is going to feel very vindicated, and $V bulls are going to have a very bad afternoon.