BofA Total card spending (Aug) +4.5% Y/Y; spending remained robust while discretionary services continue to provide a steady foundation despite moderation in a few categories

Proprietary card data from a large issuer sits in the tier of high-frequency consumption trackers that desks use to position ahead of official retail sales and PCE, though the historical mapping is imperfect: issuer panels skew toward their own customer base and card share of spend, so prints of this kind have tended to confirm or shade the trend rather than reset it. A mid-single-digit nominal gain is consistent with the pattern that has characterized much of this cycle, where aggregate spending holds up while mix rotates, and the distinction that matters is goods versus discretionary services: services resilience has repeatedly offset goods softness and kept the consumption leg of the growth story intact. Moderation in a few categories is the sort of detail that feeds the ongoing debate about the lower-income consumer, where delinquency and spend-growth divergences across income cohorts have been the usual tell of fatigue. Follow-ons are how this reads against the same month's retail sales and the services components of PCE, and whether competing issuer and payments-network data corroborate the direction. As an input it informs, it does not decide.