Here is a data problem that is keeping economists up at night: the US economy keeps growing, but the Americans living in it increasingly feel like it is not.
Consumer sentiment — a composite measure of how households perceive their own financial conditions and the broader economy — has been running well below levels that historical GDP growth rates would predict. Surveys consistently show that a significant share of Americans believe the economy is in recession or declining, even as headline GDP registers expansion. CNBC has dubbed this the "boomcession": an economy that looks good on the ledger but feels bad on the ground.
That divergence is not a communications failure. It is a structural story — and a companion analysis from Bloomberg makes the mechanism clear: the expansion is proceeding largely without the job creation that economic growth has historically delivered.
A boom that is not being shared
GDP measures the total value of goods and services produced in an economy. It says nothing about how those gains are distributed. In the current cycle, the growth is real — but it is concentrated. Corporate profit margins have stayed historically elevated even as real wage growth for median workers has been uneven. Asset prices — stocks, residential real estate, commercial property — have appreciated substantially. The households that own significant financial assets have seen their balance sheets grow. The households that do not have experienced the inflation of the past three years primarily as a cost, not an offset.
This is why the boomcession feels true to the people living through it. For a household with a primary residence but minimal stock holdings, the wealth effect of the recent bull market is essentially zero. What registers is that groceries cost materially more than they did in 2021, rent is up sharply in most major metros, and auto insurance and childcare costs have accelerated. Nominal wages have risen — but for many workers, not fast enough to restore the real purchasing power eroded by the inflation surge.
The jobless growth complication
Bloomberg's analysis of what it calls the "jobless boom" adds the second dimension. The current expansion is proceeding with notably weak net job creation relative to historical precedent. Layoffs in the technology sector, ongoing automation in logistics and back-office functions, and corporate reticence about adding headcount in an uncertain interest rate environment have combined to produce GDP growth that is increasingly capital-intensive and labor-light.
For the Federal Reserve, this creates a genuine dual-mandate problem. The Fed is charged with both price stability and maximum employment. An economy that is growing but not creating jobs at scale sits awkwardly in its policy framework: not the overheating that calls for rate hikes, but not the labor market weakness that would clearly justify cuts either. The result is policy paralysis dressed up as patience.
For workers, the jobless growth dynamic has a more direct impact: the historical relationship between GDP expansion and individual job security has weakened. Knowing the economy is growing is less reassuring when company-level hiring remains frozen.
What this means for retail and consumer-facing businesses
For CFOs and retail sector analysts, the boomcession is not an abstraction — it is a demand signal. Consumer discretionary spending has bifurcated: luxury and premium categories continue to perform, supported by wealthy consumers whose asset-driven purchasing power is intact. But mid-market and value-oriented retailers are navigating a squeezed consumer who is prioritizing essentials and trading down where possible.
Forward guidance from major retailers heading into the back half of 2026 will be watched as a proxy for whether the boomcession is entrenching or resolving. If the labor market remains soft and real wage growth stays muted, expect downward revisions to same-store sales projections across the mid-market. Companies that assumed a full consumer recovery are carrying earnings estimates that are too optimistic.
The policy stakes
The boomcession also has an explanatory function that economists and policymakers are slowly accepting. When public confidence in official economic statistics diverges this sharply from lived experience, it is not public ignorance — it is evidence that the statistics are measuring one thing while people are experiencing another. GDP is a production measure, not a well-being measure.
The honest policy question is not why consumers feel bad about a good economy. It is why the growth is not reaching them — and whether the structural conditions producing the jobless, unequal boom are self-correcting or self-reinforcing. Right now, the evidence points more toward the latter.
