The U.S. Economy’s Secret Weapon: Seniors With Money to Spend

Why has consumer spending proven so resilient as the Federal Reserve has raised interest rates? An important and little-appreciated reason: Consumers are getting older.

In August, 17.7% of the population was 65 or older, according to the Census Bureau, the highest on record going back to 1920 and up sharply from 13% in 2010. The elderly aren’t just more numerous: Their finances are relatively healthy and they have less need to borrow, such as to buy a house, and are less at risk of layoffs than other consumers.

This has made the elderly a spending force to be reckoned with. Americans age 65 and up accounted for 22% of spending last year, the highest share since records began in 1972 and up from 15% in 2010, according to the Labor Department’s survey of consumer expenditures released in September.

“These are the consumers that will matter over the coming year,” said Susan Sterne, chief economist at Economic Analysis Associates.

“Our large share of older consumers provides a consumption base in times like today when job growth slows, interest rates rise and student-debt loan repayments begin again,” she said.

Seniors’ high spending propensities reflect health, wealth and perhaps lingering psychological effects of the pandemic.

“All my life it was, save for this, save for that,” said Maureen Green, 66, of Cape Cod, Mass. “Now there’s money in the bank and I’m spending in ways that bring me closer to friends and family than I did before.”

Green, a real-estate agent with four grown children living across the country, estimated she is spending 25% more and twice as much time traveling now compared with 2019. She recently traveled to Syracuse, N.Y., to catch a photo exhibit with friends, and toured Rhode Island with her son and his girlfriend.

“The one million Americans who didn’t survive Covid—that’s part of it. That taught me not to let time go by because before I know it, that time won’t be there anymore,” she said.

Living better, longer—and larger

“The lifestyle of the senior has changed dramatically—they’re more active than ever,” said Marshal Cohen, chief retail adviser of Circana, a research firm specialising in consumer behavior. That has expanded the menu of recreation on which to spend, he said. “They’re riding e-bikes, they’re hiking, they’re traveling. And they’re doing these things for longer than they’ve ever been done.”

The average household led by someone age 65 and older spent 2.7% more last year than in 2021, adjusted for inflation, according to the Labor Department, compared with 0.7% for under-65 households. Spending by older households is up 34.5% from 1982, compared with 16.5% for younger households.

Comparable data isn’t available for 2023. However, consumers older than 60 reported spending 7.9% more in August than a year earlier, compared with a 5.1% increase among those age 40 to 60 and a 4.6% gain for younger consumers, according to a survey by the New York Fed. The data aren’t adjusted for inflation.

The growing yen to spend by the elderly is amplified by their sheer numbers. The unusually large cohort of baby boomers, the youngest of which are 59, are reaching their retirement years en masse.

American Cruise Lines, which gears its cruises toward older consumers, said it is seeing double-digit sales growth this year, driven largely by boomers. The Guilford, Conn., company this year added three ships to its fleet and expanded its season by a month for some popular routes.

“River cruising has traditionally attracted an older audience, and with more boomers retiring each year, we see both a rapid rate of growth and demand for longer experiences,” said Charles B. Robertson, the company’s president and chief executive.

The economy’s silver bullet

Another factor in the elderly’s favor: relatively strong finances. Americans age 70 and older now hold nearly 26% of household wealth, the highest since records began in 1989, according to the Federal Reserve.

While economists still see a relatively high probability of recession in the coming year, Ed Yardeni, president and chief investment strategist of Yardeni Research, isn’t one of them. An important reason: By the Fed’s reckoning, baby boomers alone have now amassed $77.1 trillion in wealth. “There’s a $77 trillion-wide hole in the theory that consumers’ running out of pandemic savings will sink the economy,” he said.

They have less consumer debt, minimal student debt and are more likely to own their homes outright. Many of those who have mortgages refinanced at the unprecedented low in mortgage rates after the pandemic hit. They are also less likely to need to move due to an expanding family or a new job than Gen Z and Millennials, shielding them from the impact of rising housing costs.

Retirees also received an 8.7% cost-of-living-adjustment bump to Social Security payments in January, the largest single-year increase since 1981, and an automatic adjustment to offset last year’s 9.1% inflation peak.

These factors have cushioned seniors from the twin scourges of inflation and high interest rates. And since most of them are retired, seniors’ spending is less vulnerable to the rise in unemployment that many economists anticipate in coming quarters.

Subscription demand for the Cincinnati Opera’s summer festival this year was surprisingly strong and driven by older patrons, said Todd Bezold, director of marketing.

“Despite the multiyear trend in subscriptions going down, down, down in every art form, we went up this year—by 3%,” he said. That jump in demand came despite a sharp rise in ticket prices to account for several years of inflation. “The vast majority of our subscribers are baby boomers; we know that much.”

Elon Musk’s SpaceX is set to make its stock-market debut Friday in the largest IPO ever—and perhaps the most closely watched. The company sold an outsized portion of the offering to individuals. Its performance on Friday will be a crucial gauge of investor appetite for mega-offerings from OpenAI and Anthropic expected later this year.

The rocket maker, which derives most of its revenue from its satellite internet unit and has a nascent artificial-intelligence business, will trade under the ticker “SPCX.” It sold 555.6 million shares at $135 each, raising about $75 billion in a deal that valued the company at roughly $1.77 trillion.

When will shares open for trading?

SpaceX executives are set to ring the Nasdaq’s opening bell in New York, but shares in buzzy initial public offerings don’t tend to start trading until later in the day.

Bankers leading an IPO typically want to match buyers and sellers for about 10% of the shares sold before opening trading to lessen volatility. For SpaceX, that would be about 55 million shares, or roughly $7.5 billion worth.

Because pre-IPO investors are restricted from selling shares for a while, it can take time to find willing sellers among those who bought shares in a high-demand IPO.

Shares of Alibaba , the largest U.S. IPO until SpaceX, opened for trading a little before noon in its 2014 offering. Last year, one of the highest-profile offerings was that of software maker Figma , whose shares started trading just before 2 p.m.

It is possible that SpaceX’s bankers will decide to start trading without matching the typical portion of orders to ensure the shares have several hours of trading on their first day, people familiar with the matter say.

How volatile will the stock be?

Bankers and traders expect SpaceX’s share price could be volatile in initial trading, thanks in part to the large portion of its shares expected to be held by individual investors. Some who anticipate individuals will rush into the shares worry they could just as easily get spooked and rush out.

Any sharp movement in stock price could trigger so-called circuit breakers that could pause trading. For most newly listed companies, a 10% swing in either direction prompts a five-minute pause. Companies that had their shares halted include Figma and Cerebras Systems , the chip company whose shares soared in its May debut.

These forced timeouts applied to single stocks came after the so-called flash crash in 2010, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 700 points in eight minutes before recouping much of the loss.

What is all the talk about the ‘green-shoe’ option?

If the stock starts trading erratically, bankers have a secret weapon to attempt to calm things down.

Underwriters typically sell more shares to investors than an IPO’s total offer size, colloquially called the green shoe. In SpaceX’s case, they sold about 15% more shares than the stated offering size.

Because this means they technically allocated more than the offering amount, the so-called stabilisation agent, in this case, Morgan Stanley , needs to buy back the excess number of shares to deliver them. If the stock starts to fall, the bank will buy the shares in the open market, which helps buoy the stock price. If the stock isn’t faltering, the stabilisation agent can buy the additional shares they need to deliver to investors directly from the company.

The term “green shoe” comes from the first company to employ a version of this method years ago, a shoemaker that was a predecessor to Stride Rite. When Meta Platforms , then known as Facebook, went public in 2012, its shares started dropping and its bankers stepped in to buy more shares.

How will Elon Musk’s take-it-or-leave-it pricing fare?

Like all things Musk, SpaceX’s IPO bucked the norms. Instead of approaching prospective investors with a possible price range for shares ahead of the IPO and incorporating their feedback, the company set an exact share price from the beginning: $135.

The idea was to limit drama for what is already the biggest IPO of all time. It did, however, remove what many see as an important step along the way: price discovery. The success of this approach will partly be judged by how SpaceX’s shares trade Friday. If the stock surges, critics will say SpaceX left money on the table by not pricing shares higher. If the stock falls or trades flat, there will likely be critiques that SpaceX and its advisers overestimated demand.

Will the machinery hold up—and what will be the wider market impact?

The sheer size of SpaceX’s IPO will test the trading infrastructure at Nasdaq and could have ripple effects in the broader market.

Nasdaq has practiced with mock openings to make sure its trading platform is prepared. When Facebook went public, some investors who tried to change or cancel orders ahead of trading didn’t get confirmations because of a technology malfunction. The confusion contributed to Facebook shares dropping on the first day of trading. They didn’t return back above their IPO price for more than a year.

Meanwhile, some market watchers expect added activity Friday in stocks that individual investors might sell to buy SpaceX shares, such as those of technology companies and Musk’s electric-car maker Tesla . Such sales already appeared to be under way earlier in the week, when individual investors dumped single-stock holdings on a net basis for two days in a row, according to Vanda Research. (To be sure, those sales came on days that were poor showings for tech stocks broadly.)

It will take several days for SpaceX shares to show up in any major index funds , so the offering’s wider impact on the market could play out over the next several weeks or longer.