US Consumer Sentiment Rebounds in Michigan Survey

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Transcript

00:00This is soft data, of course, but it looks pretty good.

00:03Sentiment improving and inflation expectations coming down.

00:07Well, it does follow the pattern that we saw with the conference board,

00:10although it is a little different, Katie, in that the big news in the conference board numbers

00:14was in the expectations index, which really jumped.

00:18We're not seeing a jump here, just a little bit of a rise, and it's still below 50.

00:21So people in the Michigan survey are not as optimistic going forward.

00:25The conference board's one-year-ad inflation number fell from 7% to 6.5%,

00:31so we're seeing about the same move here now.

00:34That may be because gasoline prices are coming down and food prices have come down a little bit.

00:39That may be the good news.

00:41What everybody always looks at with the Michigan numbers, of course, is what the political aspect of it is,

00:48and we're seeing that Democrats were more pessimistic this month, 33.9 from 34.4,

00:54and even Republican optimism was down, the numbers 84.2 from 90.2.

01:01It's independents, where we saw some increase in optimism, 48.2 from 46.2.

01:08So it does look like the middle of the country, which doesn't have as much of a dog in the fight politically,

01:15is feeling a little bit better about things, but again, 48.2 is still below the 50 break-even point.