Walmart CEO On Consumer Resilience

Walmart CEO Doug McMillon speaks at a Goldman Sachs conference. The below headlines are taken from Bloomberg:

• US consumers have heled up better than expected.
• He feels ‘pretty good’ about the 2H23 with US consumers poised for ‘some relief’ in prices and general merchandise prices lower than a year ago.
• He expects a ‘pretty good’ US holiday season whilst next year’s consumer headwinds are ‘about the same’.

It comes against a backdrop of strong nationwide consumer spending, with the Atlanta Fed GDPNow tracking it contributing a strong 2.8pps of a particularly elevated 5.6% real GDP growth for Q3. It would mark a quick acceleration from the 1.7% annualized consumer spending in Q2 in what was payback from 4.2% in Q1, with the consumer generally holding up well considering the magnitude of monetary policy tightening.