A bit of bad economic news: This morning, the Conference Board announced that consumer confidence, a key indicator of the consumer spending that drives about 60 percent of the economy, is declining again.
America’s consumers — aware of the bad economic stats and suffering from high rates of unemployment — are not feeling confident. From the Conference Board’s report on its closely watched consumer confidence index:
[The index], which had been on the rise for three consecutive months, declined sharply in June.
Well, it won’t be all doom and gloom here today. Consumer confidence — an important bellwether of increasing household spending — shot up last month.
The Conference Board says that consumers’ expectations about today’s and tomorrow’s economic conditions continue to improve from low lows. Consumers’ six-month outlook climbed to More…
While economists got out their pom-poms last week to celebrate the news that official unemployment is only 9.7 percent (while skillfully ignoring the increase in underemployment and the 40 percent of the unemployed who have been that way for six months or more), Americans weren’t buying their routine. More…
On ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday, both Paul Krugman and Robert Reich offered far more pessimistic views of the economy than the rosier outlook put forth by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke on Friday. Krugman described the economy as languishing in purgatory. Reich explained that the More…
Leading headlines this morning are two economic datapoints that count as positive in the current climate. Thursday is the day for weekly jobless claims, and while initial and continuing claims remain at extremely high levels (the latter hit yet another record), the steady downtick in initial weekly claims over More…
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