Strong Reactions to Conference Board Consumer Confidence Index Today. Here’s some context for this move, as well as that from Michigan’s U.S. Economic Sentiment Survey.
Figure 1: University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment (blue, left scale), Conference Board Consumer Confidence (bronze, left scale), Gallup Economic Confidence (light green, left scale), all degraded and normalized by standard deviation (for the sample period displayed); And Shapiro, Sudhof and Wilson (2020) Daily News Sentiment Index (black, right scale). The News Index observation for April extends until 04/25/2024. The NBER has defined the peak to trough dates of the recession in gray. Source: U.Mich via FRED, Conference Board via Investing.com, Gallup, SF FedNBER and author’s calculations.
While all indexes fell (as did the News Sentiment Index) in April, the Conference Board’s index is significantly above pandemic levels. The surprise is that this index has not reacted much to the increasingly positive sentiment of the news (unlike the American indices of Michigan and Gallup).
