Are We Cooked?
A weekly score for the social, economic, and cultural temperature of America.
We're holding at Well Done — the index doesn't move much when the underlying conditions don't move much, and they didn't. Affordability is still the squeeze that everyone feels at the grocery store and the gas pump. Debt strain — both the consumer kind and the federal kind — keeps grinding higher. The bright spot, relatively, is Opportunity: layoffs cooled and openings ticked up, which is why this pillar is sitting in Sizzling instead of joining the rest in Well Done.
How hard is it for normal people to afford normal life?
Home-price-to-income is still sitting near generational highs, rent and groceries aren't backing off, and the 10Y has stayed sticky. Wages are running, but they're running into a price level that was reset and never reset back. The longer arc here is financial repression — central banks tolerating elevated inflation to inflate down debt — and renters and first-time buyers are absorbing the cost.
Are normal people drowning in debt — and is the government drowning too?
Consumer debt service ratios are creeping up, credit card delinquency is at multi-year highs, and the personal savings rate is back near pre-pandemic floors. Underneath the household squeeze, the federal balance sheet is doing the same thing on a different timescale: debt-to-GDP keeps climbing and interest expense is now competing with major spending lines. When the federal government and your credit card are bidding for the same dollars, something gives.
Can you actually build a life?
The single area where the news isn't all bad. Job openings ticked up modestly, layoffs cooled, and youth unemployment didn't get worse. But homeownership for 25-34 year olds is still well below the historical baseline, and the AI overhang on white-collar entry-level work hasn't gone anywhere. We're calling Sizzling, not Raw — the milestones are still harder than they used to be.
Are we connected, sane, and functioning as a society?
Consumer sentiment is stuck in a band that historically only shows up in or around recessions, even though we're not officially in one. Fertility hit another low. Trust in institutions is in the basement. The data here is the texture of a Fourth Turning — the social fabric isn't snapping, but it's pulled tight in a way that's now the baseline.
Is the system working for regular people, or just the top?
The split-screen economy keeps splitting. The S&P is fine. Gold is more than fine. The top 1% wealth share is back near its highs and the bottom 50% share hasn't moved meaningfully in years. Sentiment-vs-S&P keeps reading like two different countries because in lived terms it is two different countries.