Courtesy of Doug Short’s Advisor Perspectives.
The latest Conference Board Consumer Confidence Index was released this morning based on data collected through July 14. The headline number of 97.3, was slight decline from the June final reading of 97.4 in June Today’s number was above the Investing.com consensus of 95.9.
Here is an excerpt from the Conference Board press release.
“Consumer confidence held steady in July, after improving in June,” said Lynn Franco, Director of Economic Indicators at The Conference Board. “Consumers were slightly more positive about current business and labor market conditions, suggesting the economy will continue to expand at a moderate pace. Expectations regarding business and labor market conditions, as well as personal income prospects, declined slightly as consumers remain cautiously optimistic about growth in the near-term.”
Putting the Latest Number in Context
The chart below is another attempt to evaluate the historical context for this index as a coincident indicator of the economy. Toward this end we have highlighted recessions and included GDP. The regression through the index data shows the long-term trend and highlights the extreme volatility of this indicator. Statisticians may assign little significance to a regression through this sort of data. But the slope resembles the regression trend for real GDP shown below, and it is a more revealing gauge of relative confidence than the 1985 level of 100 that the Conference Board cites as a point of reference.
On a percentile basis, the latest reading is at the 55 percentile of all the monthly data points since June 1977, unchanged from the previous month.
For an additional perspective on consumer attitudes, see the most recent Reuters/University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index. Here is the chart from that post.
And finally, let’s take a look at the correlation between consumer confidence and small business sentiment, the latter by way of the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) Small Business Optimism Index. As the chart illustrates, the two have tracked one another fairly closely since the onset of the Financial Crisis, although a bit of spread has appeared in the second half of 2015 and start of 2016.
