Bank of America Institute Consumer Checkpoint

The Bank of America Institute is the bank's think tank, and its most useful output for markets is Consumer Checkpoint. Each month its economists, including David Tinsley and Liz Everett Krisberg, aggregate credit and debit card spending, deposits and payroll flows across the bank's customers and publish a short report on spending growth, its breadth across categories, and the gap between lower-, middle- and higher-income households.

Because the data come from transactions rather than surveys, they land ahead of the official retail sales and income releases and break the picture down by income group in ways government data often cannot. The Institute adds a monthly employment report based on deposit data, a Business Checkpoint on small and mid-sized firms, and occasional pieces on topics such as insurance costs, child care and AI infrastructure financing.

Read Consumer Checkpoint each month alongside the official data. It is a good way to learn how alternative data sets are built and where they can mislead.