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Saying One Thing, Doing Another
"Along with the ongoing impact of inflation, attitudes have also been weighed down by rising borrowing costs, declining asset values and weakening labor market expectations," Joanne Hsu, director of the University of Michigan sentiment survey, said Wednesday.
It was a grim, albeit familiar, assessment of the mood among American consumers. Final readings on the survey's headline and component indexes for November all confirmed a deterioration from October, concentrated in perceptions of current
The correlation between the published consumer confidence indices and retail spending has long been surprisingly low. (I can recall quarreling with a Barron’s writer about this 15+ years ago.) ISM surveys still seem to be more predictive.