Money Anxiety
***President's Special***
Because we want as many of our members to see Dr. Daniel Geller and receive the blockbuster information that he is going to impart to us this Friday, we are going to make this a FREE event for members /$10 for non-members.
Dr. Dan Geller
Dr. Dan Geller is a behavioral economist and the author of Money Anxiety. He pioneered the research on the link between money anxiety and financial behavior. Based on his research, Dr. Geller developed the Money Anxiety Index, which predicts economic trends.
Dr. Geller's research is featured in his book Money Anxiety - an insightful behavioral economics book that reveals how people make financial decisions. The book explains why we hate to lose more than we love to win and why we spend when safe and save when scared.
About The Money Anxiety Index
The Money Anxiety Index measures the level of consumers' financial worry and stress based on their spending and savings pattern. Historically, the Money Anxiety Index fluctuated from a high of 135.3 during the recession of the early 1980s, to a low of 38.7 in the mid 1960s.
The Money Anxiety Index functions as an early-warning system to shifts in the economy, allowing financial advisors to react in time to changes in the economic cycle. The Money Anxiety Index Is highly predictive. It predicted the arrival of the Great Recession over a year prior to the official declaration of the recession in December of 2007.
This Lecture
The January preliminary Money Anxiety Index improved 1.3 points to 62.2 despite market volatility in the U.S. and abroad in the first week of the new year. The decrease in the level of money anxiety is in part due to a robust December jobs report adding 292,000 non-farm jobs. Job gains were strong in the service sectors such as professional & business, education & health and leisure & hospitality.
The improvement in the January Money Anxiety Index comes after 3 months of a flat index mostly due to fear and anxiety resulting from terror attacks in the U.S. and abroad in the last quarter of 2015. Acts of terror promote economic uncertainty and financial anxiety in people, who instinctively react by reducing spending. Early readings show that the 2015 holiday shopping season was up only about 1.5 percent over the previous year indicting consumers were holding back on spending.
The biggest threat to the U.S. economy is not market volatility, but rather fears of terrorism. Terrorism impacts the economy in two distinct ways. The first is the immediate impact on commerce right after a terror attack. The November terror attack in Paris de facto paralyzed commerce in parts of Paris, and later on in the entire city of Brussels in Belgium, for a few days. Repeated economic disruptions like these can have severe economic impact on local and national economies.
The second economic implication of terror acts is in elevating financial anxiety in the aftermath of every terror attack. The terror act of September 11, 2001 immediately increased the level of money anxiety of people in the U.S. In the month of the attack, September, the Money Anxiety Index jumped 5.1 points from 56.9 in the previous month and continued to climb up nearly 21 points when it peaked at 77.6 on December of 2001.
