A fatter wallet spells higher sales:
Personal income, boosted by a large dividend payment from computer software giant Microsoft Corp., shot up by a record 3.7 percent in December. That helped to boost consumer spending during the all-important holiday season by 0.8 percent. The Commerce Department reported Monday that the income gain would have been a smaller 0.6 percent in December without the one-time $3 per share dividend payment Microsoft made on Dec. 2. Even that reduced figure would have been an improvement over the 0.4 percent rise in personal incomes in November....For all of 2004, personal incomes increased by 5.4 percent, the largest annual advance since an 8 percent jump in 2000, the last full year of the decade-long economic expansion.
One could even argue that 2000's increases were still a reflection of the "irrational exuberance" filling the stock market bubble — and that this expansion is for real.