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.
