During Covid, we couldn't really do anything with our money (other than basic living expenses) except maybe home improvement. Savings skyrocketed during the lockdowns. Coming out of Covid, two things happened. First is there was quite a bit of revenge-spending. People are travelling, going out to eat, taking cruises, etc. at a higher rate than pre-pandemic just because we can. Second is interest rates have spiked. For much of the last 20 years if given an option of spending your own savings or borrowing the money at nearly-zero interest, spending someone else's money was pretty attractive. But today, paying cash (or making HUGE down payments) for cars, homes, home improvement, etc. makes sense I've you've got it with borrowing costs much higher. Revenge spending should be dying down and interest rates are more likely than not to slowly drop over the next couple of years, so I'm not sure this really amounts to a gloom-and-doom predictor. It's been a hundred years since we had a pandemic that affected the US, so most of our economic forecasting models are going to get wonky when trying to figure out what is likely to happen as we go through, and out of, a pandemic.