While pretty much everyone is feeling their wallets getting lighter this year, things probably aren’t at their worst yet. The (economic) worst, unfortunately, is still to come. CNN notes in its Business Nightcap newsletter that the US is technically not in a recession… the keyword here being technically.
“Economists look to several indicators—GDP growth, employment, bond yields, wages, etc—to determine the answer,” writes Allison Morrow. “Of course, there are other, less scientific but more fun ways to gauge economic health. Famously, there's the Lipstick Index, which suggests lipstick sales surge in lean times because it's an inexpensive indulgence that makes people happy. Alan Greenspan put forward the Men's Underwear Index, demonstrating that sales of boxers and briefs plummeted from 2007 to 2009, during the Great Recession, before picking back up as the economy recovered. One other, deeply unscientific, indicator: The Powerball.”
According to CNN, the Powerball lottery jackpot is expected to grow to a jaw-dropping $1.9 billion ahead of the drawing. It is the largest lottery prize ever in the history of the United States. The chances of winning this huge sum (before taxes, of course) is around 1 in 292 million. “You're more likely to be eaten by a shark. Or be struck by lightning twice,” Morrow writes.
At the time of publishing, the Powerball jackpot grew to $2.04 billion, and the winning ticket was drawn in California. CNBC notes that the winner can hope to get roughly a quarter of that money after all the bureaucracy.
But why all of this talk about the Powerball? Well, you see, during the last recession, US state lotteries noted that there were huge declines in ticket sales, as people were pinching pennies and cutting out all unnecessary expenses.
In other words, the idea is that people still being able to spend a couple of bucks to buy a lottery ticket may be seen as a soft indicator that things haven’t gotten truly awful yet, savings-wise. It’s when people stop buying tickets altogether that you can be pretty certain—things are around their worst.
