Economic signals are blinking green. Why Americans are still seeing red.

The American economy reads a little like a Dickens novel these days – and for Joe Biden, it’s in desperate need of a plot twist.

For more than a year, the narrative has been stuck between “best of times” data and “worst of times” sentiment. Unemployment has been incredibly low and consumer spending abnormally resilient. But consumers have proved dour, unwilling to give President Biden much credit because of the sting of recent high inflation and continuing sky-high housing costs.

Now, the United States is poised – maybe – to turn the page on such uncertainty. The economy is slowing. Inflation looks like it’s falling again. On Friday, the Labor Department reported that the unemployment rate rose to 4.1%, the highest rate since 2021. All this could help convince the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates in coming months, making business loans and home mortgages cheaper.

How voters will interpret all this come November is complicated – and could get more complicated if Mr. Biden drops out of the presidential race. Much depends on how the eventual Democratic nominee – whoever that is – frames recent trends and what promises they make.

The American economy reads a little like a Dickens novel these days – and for Joe Biden, it’s in desperate need of a plot twist.

For more than a year, the narrative has been stuck between “best of times” data and “worst of times” sentiment. Unemployment has been incredibly low and consumer spending abnormally resilient. But consumers have proved dour, unwilling to give President Biden much credit because of the sting of recent high inflation and continuing sky-high housing costs.

Now, the United States is poised – maybe – to turn the page on such uncertainty. The economy is slowing. Inflation looks like it’s falling again. On Friday, the Labor Department reported that the unemployment rate rose to 4.1%, the highest rate since 2021.

All this could help convince the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates in coming months, making business loans and home mortgages cheaper and bolstering Mr. Biden’s narrative that the economy is getting back to normal.

“I think people are just uncertain and that’s why we got to be steady, stay the course and continue to produce this incredible job” expansion, President Biden said in an interview with Yahoo Finance in May. 

But the economy has proved fickle before. After falling dramatically last year, inflation hit a stubborn plateau at the beginning of this year, killing hopes of rapid cuts in interest rates. On the other side, a growing number of economists are warning that the slowdown, far from normalization, is in fact signaling the threat of a deep recession.