Consumer confidence among American households crumbled in November, according to a highly unfortunate read on one of the nation’s most important macro mood metrics.

At 88.7, the Conference Board headline fell 6.8 points from October, the second-largest month-to-month decline since August of 2021. Needless to say, the print missed estimates. Consensus wanted 93.4.

As the figure below shows, the measure’s now the worst since April, which is to say the worst since Donald Trump’s botched tariff rollout. It’s also below the depths plumbed in and around the CPI peak in mid-2022.

“All five components of the overall index flagged or remained weak,” Conference Board chief economist Dana Peterson said.

I don’t want to be gratuitous (actually I don’t care), but this was an awful release, and it underscored the message from what I dubbed “the worst consumer sentiment report ever” (recall that all three main indexes in the University of Michigan report registered what might as well be record lows this month).

The expectations index in the Conference Board report printed 63.2 for November. Forget how bad that is relative to the 80 threshold which typically presages recessions within a year, that’s one of the worst readouts since the GFC.

Read that again: A year on from Donald Trump’s reelection, economic expectations among US households have only been worse a handful of times since capitalism itself nearly failed.

Peterson described the drop in expectations for household incomes as “dramatic,” the outlook for six-month ahead labor market conditions as “decidedly negative” and forward-looking opinions on business conditions as “notably more pessimistic.”

In October, nearly 20% of consumers expected their incomes to increase. That figure this month was 3%. Just 1% of consumers described business conditions as “good” this month. That share was 21% last month. I could go on.

Not surprisingly, the write-in responses continued to suggest the most vexing issues for Americans are prices and inflation, followed by tariffs and trade, politics and acute dysfunction inside the Beltway.