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Catherine Rampell:

I think they're a little bit worrying, yes.

I don't want to use the dreaded R-word, recession. And I don't think we are there yet. There's no sign that we are there yet. But there are some vulnerabilities that are clear in this economy.

Americans have spent down there extra savings, or a large part of their extra savings that they accumulated during the pandemic, both as a result of forced saving, essentially, not traveling and not going out and dining out and things like that, and also a lot of those fiscal policies, those various government transfers that had helped people amass more savings.

They have spent a lot of that down, both because time has passed and because prices have been high, et cetera. You see the result of that in those rising credit card delinquency rates, for example, in the lower savings rates that we have seen recently, and some other signs of stress throughout the economy.

And we don't know the full extent of the consequences of the Fed's rate hikes to date. I mean, the whole point of those rate hikes was to tighten financial conditions and to make it harder for people to borrow and make it less likely that they would spend money. That's a feature, not a bug, of all of that.

But there is a lag between when the Fed raises rates and when it's ultimately felt. And so we don't know how much more is working its way through the system at this point and how much additional pain that could cause later on.

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