Americans aren’t losing their jobs. The stock market isn’t in freefall. And the official recession call is nowhere in sight. But Goldman Sachs is sounding an alarm about something quieter and more insidious: the purchasing power of the American paycheck is eroding at a pace the economy almost never sees unless it’s already in a downturn.
In a research note published Sunday, Goldman economists Manuel Abecasis and Joseph Briggs found that real personal income per worker — stripped of government transfers and adjusted for inflation — declined 0.6% over the past year. That’s a pace they describe as “rarely seen outside of recession,” with the only comparable non-recessionary episodes being a brief inflation shock in mid-2022 and a tax-policy distortion in 2013.
