Real Disposable Income

Buried inside yesterday's BEA report on April Personal Income (tables available here, see Table 10) is the statistic that "Real Disposable Personal Income" grew at an annual rate of 1.82% in April 2008 compared to April 2007, the highest rate of growth since December 2007 (see chart above). This will probably not get a lot of attention from the media, but provides some additional evidence that the U.S. economy is not on the verge of recession, and might in fact actually be "moderately" healthy.