Gamers are still buying them and so is everyone else
Given that this is the same curiosity and question since pre-pandemic and now we have many examples of a premium, I think its not a real worry as long as the chips perform
"China needs the American market because they can't make up the numbers for the rest of the world combined in the short term"
Can people here help answer where the heck does everyone have the money to buy all this stuff? Especially post COVID with all the layoffs? The US is only 5% of the world population. Europe isn't that poor and many chunks of Asia have a lot of wealth now. Yet America's appetite and more importantly capability of absorbing all manner of goods remains unimpaired...how?!
Its a long answer but there are many winners in every financial environment in America, while the short answer is that nobody knows how they have money en masse to buy stuff
and the whole system is based on incentivizing them to move that money around the economy, as opposed to collect and save it in a bank account
Literally this.
Median household income in America is US$8,000 per month.
Half of Americans make MORE than that.
And 2.5 Americans per household will say “they make more than that”
Kids say “my dad is rich” and wives say “we make $70k/month”
The thing is that WW2 decimated most of the advanced economies outside of the US, and for decades afterwards many of them simply weren't managed for growth (i.e. the Soviet bloc). So the US had a huge head start and never stopped running. To this day you still don't really see many other countries being as fixated on juicing consumer spending as the US is. The big play of the last few decades has been all these emerging economies getting good at exports and making a lot of money that way, which has cut into the US' lead, but once they have the money they tend to be less aggressive about getting it circulating internally - it accrues to a fairly small number of people and/or they just sit on a lot of it.
Add on moralizing about how people should be making and not spending and you've got yourself a recipe for an export-oriented slowdown, since at some point the world won't be wealthy enough to keep raising your economy through only exports. We saw this in Japan, South Korea, and more recently Germany and China.
The US economy is doing fine.
Europe is that poor and while lots of Asia has wealth not by comparison.
> Yet America's appetite and more importantly capability of absorbing all manner of goods remains unimpaired...how?!
We are just that much richer. It's honestly mind-blowing how much more money the average American has then anyone and everyone.
This makes me wonder though, is this sustainable?
well America does, in most states, at low income brackets. free healthcare, subsidized groceries, childcare, even some higher education
which happen to be the same income brackets that most Europeans are at lol
That said in the context of this thread on why countries seem to bend over backwards for the "privilege" to sell to the USA it's because everyone is shockingly poor by comparison.
Borrowing money from the future.
Some of that consumption is stupid from a sustainability perspective. For example:
Car dependency means that:
- both the initial cost of transportation
- and the ongoing cost are higher
- while the quality of life and health outcomes are worse
than for decent active transportation.
However no one can deny that the money is there in the US.
There are many cases of "money for the sake of money" in the US (healthcare and ultra processed foods being other examples), but again, the US is good at making money. Large, educated workforce on top of a humongous chunk of prime global real estate.
Because of this, the US dollar is the reserve currency and quite strong, which combined with strong credit means that Americans are quite incentived to spend. Another point is that this dynamic concentrates jobs in high paying roles like Finance, leading to a "winner takes all" economy. Which is relevant because 50% of consumption is done by the top 10% of the population.
this would represent an additional cost on top of that that only USA consumers pays.