For more than a year now, the U.S. economy has faced two fundamental, interwoven challenges: Consumers wouldn’t stop spending, and prices wouldn’t stop rising.Both those trends are now showing early signs of reversing.Consumer spending fell in both November and December, the Commerce Department said on Friday, as shoppers pulled back amid rising prices, dwindling savings and warnings of a looming recession.Inflation is also easing: Consumer prices rose 5 percent in the year through December, according to the Federal Reserve’s preferred measure. While still much more rapid than normal, that was the slowest pace in more than a year.Taken together, the figures paint a picture of an economy that is, at long last, coming off the boil. From the Fed’s perspective, that is good news: The central bank has spent the past year aggressively raising interest rates in an effort to force consumers and businesses alike to pull back their spending …
