“Collapsed.”
That’s the word the Conference Board used on Tuesday to describe the month-to-month change in consumer confidence across the world’s largest economy, where trepidation predominates.
The headline confidence print was just 84.5 for January, a God-awful miss to consensus which wanted 91.
Do note: The range of estimates from 53 people who get paid ~triple the median household income to make wrong guesses about the economy was 88 to 94. So, the actual readout undershot the most pessimistic forecast by 3.5ppt.
Insult to injury from an optics perspective: December’s headline was revised meaningfully higher, which made January’s drop look even larger at nearly 10ppt.
Say congratulations to Donald Trump: He’s now taken out not only his own “Liberation Day” confidence low, but in fact every Biden-era low too. Indeed, Tuesday’s Conference Board print was the worst in nearly a dozen years.
The underlying indexes were obviously terrible too. The Present Situation gauge dropped almost 10 points to 113.7, a five-year low, while the Expectations measure dropped to 65.1, the lowest since Trump’s botched tariff unveil last year and 15ppt below the threshold which historically presages a recession.
Using a six-month rolling average, confidence fell for all age groups, among all generations, across all income brackets and all political affiliations. Tellingly, the sharpest decline along political lines was observed among Independents.
It’s almost like the performance of the guy who was president in 2020 could have foretold how he would perform in a second term. What a concept!
Merica!
What a $hit show we’ve become.
Wake up!
K, I admit, I’m getting tired of winning.. please can we be the most terribly run country ever again?
Executing citizens in public and in broad daylight might just undermine one’s confidence a bit. Who’s confident about anything when you’re afraid to go out because masked men are roaming the streets with James Bond’s license to kill. How expensive are eggs when the price might be your life. Remember when drive by shootings were worrying. They pale in comparison to a government full scale invasion. If any of the geniuses in charge had half a brain they’d ditch ICE’s urban warfare uniform and go for something out of Dirty Harry’s closet. If your mission is to sneak up and grab people then dress the part or maybe that’s not the mission.
I don’t want to come down too squarely on this because plainly what’s happening in America is a nightmare, but as I mentioned in a comment on the Insurrection Act article, we don’t do ourselves any favors in the information wars department by suggesting ICE is just walking up to random people on their way into Whole Foods and shooting them in the back of the head. Nobody’s going to shoot you just for going to get eggs. (“Whatcha doin’?” “Oh, you know, just gettin’ some eggs. Thought maybe I’d try this new Chobani flavor too it looks goo–” BOOM! “Wrong answer, now you’re dead.”) The problem with that is it gives people like Stephen Miller an excuse to say the left isn’t engaging with reality, but instead positing strawmen.
Agree John’s comment was over the top, but is the situation in Minneapolis affecting the results? How much of the data was collected after Renee Good was killed?
I actually don’t think his comment was over the top, per se, I just think that when the unexaggerated truth is so clearly on your side — as it is here for Democrats — you let that truth speak for itself without embellishing it.
H-Man, if you bring in the troops and play hard ball and your troops are not necessarily the best trained troops, you troops in chasing the chicken will make mistakes. ICE is nothing more than a good bird dog that has developed a taste for chicken and will do anything to please the guy providing the chickens. Credit: Ron White. So now the guy with the chickens, is pulling back on the bird dog — “don’t kill the chicken”.
Trying to remember, why did CC crash so low in 2014? I thought it was an ok year lol.