Retailers say student loan repayments could spark slowdown as Goldman warns of ‘Q4 pothole’

Nearly two dozen retailers echoed a similar sentiment at Goldman Sachs 30th annual Global Retailing Conference on Tuesday: The US consumer has been more resilient than they expected in 2023, but there are plenty of catalysts to spark a slowdown ahead.

“The challenges in the marketplace are going to continue,” Lululemon CEO Calvin McDonald told investors on Tuesday.

There are old concerns, like sticky inflation weighing on American consumers’ wallets. And there are newcomers like the end of the student loan moratorium on October 1, which casts doubt on how much Americans will have left to spend on goods after making payments.

Tractor Supply (TSCO), a pandemic darling whose stock has nearly tripled since its March 2020 bottoms, knows it isn’t immune to the potential headwinds lurking. The retailer sells products for home improvement, lawn care and even at-home farming. As the pandemic sparked new hobbies around the house, Tractor Supply’s annual revenue increased from $8.3 billion in 2019 to $14.2 billion in 2022.

Millennials drove those gains, according to Tractor Supply CFO Kurt Burton. But while he says the company’s millennial customer is “more affluent” than the average consumer, the return of student payments is still something he is monitoring.

“The student loan repayment is certainly one that we watch,” Burton said at the conference. “We’re aware of it. And anything that takes money out of the wallet, certainly is harder for the consumer and takes some of that spend away from the goods and services that they spend on. So I think it’s one to be very conscious of.”

The headwinds that had many economists predicting a recession earlier this year are still present, but how much they will materially slow consumption remains to be seen.

“It felt to me like because of inflation that things were going to be tougher this year than they had been,”Walmart CEO Doug McMillon said. “And so I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen 12 months from now, but it feels like because of employment wages, some disinflation, that things kind of hang in. where they are.”

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‘Q4 pothole’

Goldman Sachs economics research team argues that student loan payments will decrease fourth quarter economic growth by 0.5 percentage points. But those risks “lean toward a smaller effect” as President Biden has enlisted income driven payment plans that could delay how much borrowers pay starting in October.

Still, Goldman Sachs’ economics team argued that a looming government shutdown and the potential for the United Auto Workers to strike combined with the student loan renewal will likely stifle the consumer in the four quarter.

In a research note titled the “Q4 pothole,” Goldman Sachs economists wrote the three key factors will bring gross domestic product growth from a projected 3.1% in Q3 down to 1.3% in Q4.

Goldman Sachs economists Alec Philips and Ronnie Walker note the slowdown will be “shallow and short and-lived” as they project GDP rebounds to 1.9% in the first quarter of 2024 when the “temporary drags abate and income growth reaccelerates on the back of continued solid job growth and rising real wages.”

Josh Schafer is a reporter for Yahoo Finance.

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