This summer saw major pop culture events including Barbie, Oppenheimer, Taylor Swift’s ‘Eras Tour,’ and Beyoncé’s ‘Renaissance World Tour.’ These movies and tours will contribute $8.5 billion to U.S. growth, according to Morgan Stanley. Yahoo Finance Live discusses how these events impacted consumer spending and how headwinds such as the Hollywood strikes and student loan repayment, may impact future spending.

Video Transcript

JOSH SCHAFER: So the story I have my eyes on today was research out of Morgan Stanley, saying that the boost that we saw from Taylor Swift, Barbie, and Beyonce-- the combo of those three. So the Barbenheimer box office and then also with Taylor Swift and Beyonce did on their tours is going to contribute to-- you see there-- Q3 PCE.

But then it's also going to contribute to a pretty significant drop off when you take a look at Q4. So they're saying that $8.5 billion of US growth could be attributed to those three major events, what they're calling these one-off events. And then when you remove those out, you're going to see a drop off come Q4. And I just think it's interesting to think about the rap putting a bow on the strong consumer story we've talked about a lot this summer.

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We know Barbie and Taylor Swift have actually driven that. I think that that's something that we've talked about a lot too is the box office sales are real, Allie. And so to see that actually play out and then think about when you remove that from the economy, do you have another catalyst or do we finally get the slowdown?

ALEXANDRA CANAL: Yeah. And on top of that, we have the student loan moratorium expiring, I mean, that is going to create a significant lag as well. You'd want to hope that back to school shopping, holiday retail sales, that could be a bit of a boost. But we've heard from a lot of retail analysts that say that's expected to slow down. So a lot of headwinds heading into the back half of the year, especially when we talk about consumption.

And I also think about the writers strike and how we're having all of these major films delayed. "Dune 2", which is a Warner Brothers, Discovery movie that's been pushed into 2024. There's not really-- like, they were saying that one-off driver in the back of the year to convince people to maybe it's a time to save.

JOSH SCHAFER: Well, that was-- I was joking today with the editors about there being Barbie 2. And it was like, well, we don't know. And you're probably not going to get much information on that in that current environment.

ALEXANDRA CANAL: And it's hard to recreate what "Barbie" was, the phenomenon around it, the marketing. I don't know if you can recreate that.