Strong reaction to today's Conference Board consumer confidence index. Here's some background on the sport and the University of Michigan Economic Sentiment Survey.
figure 1: University of Michigan consumer confidence (blue, left scale), Conference Board consumer confidence (tan, left scale), Gallup Economic Sentiment (light green, left scale), all devalued and by standard deviation Normalized (for the sample period shown); and Shapiro, Sudhoff, and Wilson (2020) Daily News Sentiment Index (black, right scale). April News Index observations are as of April 25, 2024. NBER-defined recession peak-to-trough dates are in gray. Source: U.Mich (from FRED), The Conference Board (from Investing.com), Gallup, SF FedNBER, and author's calculations.
While all indexes fell in April (as did the news sentiment index), the Conference Board index remained well above pandemic levels. Surprisingly, the index didn't react much to the increasingly positive news sentiment (while the University of Michigan and Gallup indices did).
