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Even though it's crept up in the past couple of months, the price of a gallon of gasoline is still about $1 less than it was a year ago. That's saving drivers $15 to $20 every time they fill up.

Economists were quite convinced late last year that would boost growth because consumers would go out and spend that extra money. But things have not unfolded exactly as forecast.

There's no doubt the plunge in oil prices and the lower costs for gasoline, heating oil and natural gas gave consumers a big windfall.

"They saved about $116 billion," says John Canally, chief economist at LPL Financial. He figures that means a savings of about $83 per month per household on average — or about $1,000 a year. Lots of economists predicted Americans would go out a spend most of that, but Canally says they didn't.

"Consumers, since oil prices peaked back in June, have done what they've been doing this entire recovery, which is essentially they've spent a little, they've saved a little and they've paid down some debt," he says.

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Seasonally adjusted annual rates Avie Schneider/NPR/Source: Bureau of Economic Analysis hide caption

itoggle caption Avie Schneider/NPR/Source: Bureau of Economic Analysis

Seasonally adjusted annual rates

Avie Schneider/NPR/Source: Bureau of Economic Analysis

Canally says he thinks many Americans learned a lesson during the financial crisis and are now being more prudent with their money. But in the short run, that's meant less consumption and less economic growth. So the growth dividend from lower energy prices has been elusive.

"I don't think it's completely materialized," says Laura Rosner, U.S. economist at BNP Paribas. For one thing, she says, the negative effects of the energy bust came faster than expected, with quick cutbacks in exploration and drilling and big job losses. That was a drag on the economy. And wicked winter weather from Virginia to Maine kept the energy windfall cash in people's pockets.

"Actually, 20 percent of all U.S. households live in either the Mid-Atlantic or the Northeast," Rosner says.

That meant tens of millions of shoppers stayed at home and contributed to a near stall-out of growth in the first quarter — far underperforming hopes that the oil price windfall would fuel faster growth.

Rosner says she thinks there's another reason the benefits of the windfall have been muted: Americans have been skeptical that the low energy prices will be lasting.

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"We're seeing evidence that consumers actually expect gasoline prices to rebound ... almost back to their prior levels within a year or two," she says. "So that's an important reason why they may not be spending more of the windfall, today."

While Rosner believes consumers have reacted cautiously up to now, she's seeing signs that they are ready to start spending more of the windfall.

"You know, really the consumer sentiment data show that consumers are feeling better about the outlook," she says "They're feeling more secure in their jobs and they're relatively optimistic."

Their added spending will help lift the U.S. growth rate this year, she says. Canally agrees, and he believes with more prudent U.S. consumers the current expansion will be longer-lasting.

gasoline

consumer spending

[Note: Listen to the audio above to hear a conversation I had with Pop Culture Happy Hour team member Stephen Thompson about the end of the show.]

Ahead of its fall programming presentation to advertisers in the afternoon, Fox announced Monday that the 15th season of American Idol, which will begin in January 2016, will be the last.

Ratings for Idol have slid precipitously over the last few seasons, but in the words of Joe Adalian at Vulture, "Idol was, for much of its run, the most dominant show on television — by a mile." It's hard to remember now, but there was a time when putting up a show against Idol was close to announcement that it was unimportant to whatever network was airing it. It was the broadcast television version of a stomping monster that took out small cities.

The original dream of propelling star after star into the heavens didn't pan out as producers might have hoped, but the show has its list of famous alums: winners Kelly Clarkson and Carrie Underwood went on to be straight-up superstars, Phillip Phillips grabbed on to the popularity of Mumford-and-Sons-y Americana as it flew by and did well for himself, other finalists like Fantasia Barrino and Constantine Maroulis went to Broadway, and a lot of others have had perfectly good careers putting out records even if they haven't been as widely recognized as the grandest of champions. Clay Aiken even ran for Congress. (And Jennifer Hudson! Who won an Oscar! And whom I originally forgot because that's how much I no longer associate her with this show.)

It seemed at one time like Idol was a show that would ebb and flow but never die, like Saturday Night Live. But Fox has other plans and other priorities, there's competition from other performance shows and other competition shows, and, as it turns out, very few things are Saturday Night Live.

So now, Ryan Seacrest will be the man who only seems to have 99 jobs. We'll have much, much more about fall schedules as this week of TV news progresses.

Saving enough money to retire can be tough. But it's next to impossible if a financial adviser is steering the client into bad investments — and getting big commissions in return. And according to the Obama administration, that's exactly what too many advisers have been doing.

Millions of Americans trying to save for retirement have ended up with investments where high fees cripple their returns over time. U.S. Labor Secretary Tom Perez says much of that is due to bad advice.

"I hear story after story of people who trusted their adviser," Perez says. Clients thought the adviser was looking out for their best interests, but "they weren't," he says.

The 'Corrosive Power' Of Hidden Fees

Perez says many financial advisers do right by their clients, but some give conflicted advice that hurts American workers. For example, an adviser might get a much bigger commission if he or she gets the client to invest in a mutual fund with fees that are very high, as opposed to a lower-fee fund that would be a better investment. Over time, those fees are very damaging.

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Perez says "the corrosive power" of fine print, hidden fees and "backdoor fees" means that "quite literally billions of dollars is being lost" in Americans' retirement accounts. So the Department of Labor has released proposed new rules requiring financial advisers to put the clients' interests above their own.

Experts Worry About Potential Loopholes

This is the first week that the public can submit comments on the new rules. In industry terms, the goal is to hold people who offer financial advice for retirement accounts to a legally binding "fiduciary standard." The current standard for many professionals in the industry is weaker than that.

"This is one of the most important pieces of consumer protection regulation that we can put in place for the American people," Perez says. "They should have a right when they go to get this financial advice that the person giving them this advice is looking out for their interests first."

It sounds like a laudable goal. But the proposed rule is more than 100 pages long. Many experts are concerned that loopholes could wind up in the midst of all that rule-making language.

David Swensen, Yale University's chief investment officer, says he's hopeful the final rule will make a big difference for millions of Americans. But he says, "I think the biggest threat to this rule is Wall Street's reaction." He adds, "[It] will clearly cost Wall Street in terms of the bottom line, and they're going to fight it tooth and nail."

That's because if advisers had to act as true fiduciaries they wouldn't be steering clients into mutual funds or other investment vehicles with very high fees.

So how effective will the new regulations be? At least some experts think the financial industry's lobbying has already weakened them.

"It's obvious that industry basically got to them," says Kent Smetters, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. He says the new rules have a very big loophole written into them already.

'A Big Grenade' In The Room

Smetters zeroed in on a part of the new rule called the "Best Interest Contract Exemption," which he says will allow financial advisers to opt out of much of the rule and still get commissions for getting clients to invest in overpriced mutual funds.

"It essentially throws a big grenade into the room," he says. "It's not just a small little hole. The industry can drive a Mack truck through it and it really allows them to essentially continue business as usual."

Perez says he looks forward to talking with Smetters, but says, "I think we have put in place appropriate guardrails."

The Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association declined requests for an interview. The group has warned that an overly burdensome rule could raise costs for average Americans. It says it's reviewing the details of the proposal.

Department of Labor

financial advisers

retirement

Theater

Athol Fugard Breaks Fences Around 'The Painted Rocks At Revolver Creek'

Two South African artists have come together on an off-Broadway stage in New York City: One is the world-famous playwright Athol Fugard, known for his dramas critical of the cruelties of apartheid. The other is the little-known artist Nukain Mabuza, who carved out an outlet for his creative vision despite the restrictions of apartheid — and now serves as the inspiration for Fugard's latest play, The Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek, opening May 11.

Fugard emphasizes in a program note that the play is not intended to be a biographical representation. But there are core similarities. In real life as in the play, Mabuza was an unschooled black migrant farmworker who worked obsessively on an elaborately painted stone garden in the 1960s and 1970s. Though deteriorated by the elements, it can still be seen today by anyone passing through the rural South African community of Revolver Creek, located between the town of Barberton and the southern border of the Kruger National Park.

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The artist brought vivid colors to the dun-colored landscape. Rene Lion-Cachet/Courtesy of JFC Clarke hide caption

itoggle caption Rene Lion-Cachet/Courtesy of JFC Clarke

The artist brought vivid colors to the dun-colored landscape.

Rene Lion-Cachet/Courtesy of JFC Clarke

In life as in the play, too, Mabuza had no legal rights or claims to ownership of his hillside artistry; the land belonged to the Afrikaner farmers for whom he worked and who allowed him to live there.

The stage set's yellow-and-black painted rocks can only hint at the expanse and scale of Mabuza's actual garden. Photographs of it in its heyday show a vast array of stone outcroppings and embedded boulders decorated with bold zebra-like stripes, geometric patterns in bright hues across the color spectrum, and pictograms of birds and animals. Though inanimate and set against the scrub brush of a rocky hillside, it seems mysteriously alive, evoking an otherworldly wonderland amid the scrappy grass and trees.

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The painted rocks seem mysteriously alive. JFC Clarke/Courtesy of JFC Clarke hide caption

itoggle caption JFC Clarke/Courtesy of JFC Clarke

The painted rocks seem mysteriously alive.

JFC Clarke/Courtesy of JFC Clarke

Mabuza is often described as an outsider artist, but that term should not be taken as a slight, says JFC Clarke, an artist and photographer based in Pretoria, South Africa. Clarke first discovered Mabuza's work in the 1980s and is the author of The Painted Stone Garden of Nukain Mabuza.

Outsider art refers to the work of untrained, self-taught artists whose creative vision goes outside (hence the name) the mainstream conventions of art. Outsider artists are also often called visionary artists. In Mabuza's case that meant envisioning a dry and rocky hillside as a flowering garden overflowing with color. And that, says Clarke, showed "genius, to take a bush-covered hillside that had no obvious potential whatsoever and devise a way to create an environmental artwork."

Like other outsider artists, Mabuza was also an outsider to the society in which he lived. He was born in Mozambique and crossed the border into South Africa, probably illegally, in the early 1960s, says Clarke. He found work as a farm laborer in the one-time mining community of Revolver Creek and built a hut for himself on a stretch of unarable boulder-filled hillside that the owners had set aside for their workers. He lived alone and never married — because, he allegedly said, a wife would eat all his money for paint.

And maybe so: By the mid-1960s, Mabuza was spending as much of his minimal wages as he could on paint, says Clarke. "He would work and paint and paint and work and starve, basically. But his "garden" also grew, both larger in scope and more sophisticated in decorative design. And he became "extremely skilled" and masterful, says Clarke. "It would appear at first glance that these geometric patterns are simple to paint." But look more closely and you'll see the care and precision with which "he layered paint until it took on a tactile quality" until those layers "built up a patina of color and textures" that he describes as "seductive."

In 1975, a South African admirer named Rene Lion-Cachet arranged for a paint supplier to donate a large surplus of paint. By then, Mabuza's painted garden had become something of a tourist attraction, with buses stopping by. Visitors gazed in awe and took photographs. "He never charged; he was always welcoming, even to people who did not donate," says Clarke.

Between the tourists and the donated paint, Mabuza was able to quit his day-laborer job and devote himself to his art. Even though he did not own the land, the white farmers who did gave him permission to pursue his passion. Though they regarded him as eccentric, they "let him be," says Clarke.

About five years after that, Mabuza abandoned his garden, and in 1981 he took his own life. Clarke explains that he had evidently declared that "he wanted to be buried in his stone garden, but this was not acceptable in traditional practice and there was a confrontation." Mabuza was buried in a pauper's grave. Despite intermittent attempts to reconstruct his masterwork it has not been maintained.

Still, Mubaza's recognition is on the upswing. In addition to Fugard's play, a newly opened Barbeton Gateway garden near the site of Mabuza's original stone garden pays tribute with a decorative stone garden inspired by his work. "His name will never be forgotten because his work has taken off in a way that is remarkable by any standard," says Clarke, who was a consultant for the new garden. "He was a masterly painter. He had mastered his craft."

Athol Fugard

visionary art

outsider art

South Africa