In this week’s macro preview, I wrote that the only question around the preliminary read on University of Michigan sentiment for October was “whether Donald Trump breaks his own records for all-time lows.”

The answer to that question, as turns out, is “yes.” At least on the current conditions index, which did indeed print a new record-worst in Friday’s only notable US macro release.

Specifically, the first read on the Michigan component which asks households to assess the general state of things was 44.7, a print so egregious you might be proud of it if all you cared about was laying claim to heretofore unheard of statistics. Like this:

A poll came out today, I think it was today, they released it today, you know what it said? If you take a look at — they call them ‘feelings.’ So ‘feelings,’ the way people feel, and you say, ‘How did people feel when, you know, when we were doing the financial crisis?’ They called it the ‘GFC’ and it happened under a man named George W. Bush. He got us into a war, a very bad war, and I was against that war if you remember. People felt very bad then. Very bad. Our GDP was negative, if you can believe it. So just today they said people are actually feeling worse now. The worst they’ve ever felt, and do you know why? It’s because of what we’re doing. We have record numbers. You look at the diesel. Nobody’s ever seen anything like it. Now we’re doing something about that. You saw this week, I told Russia, I said, ‘You gotta release the diesel,’ and they did, they released the diesel. But we’re getting the oil through. 28 million barrels last night. It’s getting through like you wouldn’t believe and your prices are going to come down. I said after the midterms. Maybe it’s a little longer, I don’t know, but your prices are coming down and you’re going to be very happy.

That’s not a real Trump quote, of course, but he is a man inclined to Clark Griswold-style “Fiiiifty yards” boasts. A part of him wants to hold every record, good or bad.

Congratulations to that part of Trump are thus in order. 44.7 on Michigan current conditions does indeed count as another record for his collection of milestones, statistical and otherwise.

For context… well, there isn’t any, is there? That’s the whole point of setting records. So let me rephrase: To put this in perspective, the pre-“Trump 2.0” low was 53.8 in June of 2022, when headline inflation was in the process of peaking and the Fed was embarking on a series of 75bps rate hikes.

There’s the chart. It’s laughable. Trump owns eight prints on the Michigan current conditions index below the above-mentioned 53.8 readout.

As for the expectations gauge, it was up from September’s final read, but just barely. At 47.3, the forward-looking measure remains deeply (and I mean deeply) depressed.

Not to belabor the point, but the long-term, pre-COVID average on the Michigan expectations index is 79. That figure includes a series of dire readings from 1980 and a similarly abysmal batch of data from 2008/2009. So, it’s not as if the arithmetic mean calculation doesn’t include some rough stretches.

The fact that, as the figure shows, we’re as far as we are from the long-term average at a time when the jobless rate is 4.2% on a bad month and the economy’s growing at a 3-4% clip, speaks loudly to Kyla’s “vibecession.”

“Overall, sentiment for lower-income consumers and those with smaller stock portfolios dropped steeply this month,” Michigan survey director Joanne Hsu said Friday, adding that “frustration over cost-of-living continues to mount.”

Year-ahead inflation expectations came in at 4.7%, 1.3ppt higher versus pre-war levels and, as Hsu was keen to note, higher than “all 2024 readings.” The closely-watched longer run series came in at 3.5%. For reference, the 2000-2020 average on that metric, which the Fed’s attentive to, is 2.8%.