A time…

by admin

The dan­ger of this time is that you stop to watch, won­der about what will come next. The para­me­ters that you assessed the future with — eco­nomic, social, polit­i­cal — are all at play. You can’t assume, and now there isn’t much con­fi­dence that you can project either.

What does the utter cli­mate of uncer­tainty do to peo­ple? It erodes con­fi­dence. Here are the Octo­ber read­ings on Con­sumer Con­fi­dence from The Con­fer­ence Board:

“The Con­fer­ence Board said the con­sumer con­fi­dence index fell to 38, down from a revised 61.4 in Sep­tem­ber and sig­nif­i­cantly below ana­lysts’ expec­ta­tions of 52.”

The low­est level since the Index was started in 1967 and the third-steepest drop ever.

That makes you think. Con­fi­dence was as 1.00 in 1967 and is 52 points lower today. I poked around on the web to get a feel for when other low points were reached, and found the fol­low­ing reference.

Is con­sumer con­fi­dence at an “all-time low”? The media say yes, but the facts say no.

“The mar­ket is tum­bling, while oil prices are soar­ing; con­sumer con­fi­dence at an all-time low,” reported Savan­nah Guthrie on the NBC “Nightly News” Jan. 12, 2008, adding, “unem­ploy­ment at a two-year high; retail­ers report­ing the weak­est hol­i­day sales in five years; hous­ing val­ues are plummeting.”

But the low­est Con­sumer Con­fi­dence Index of all time, accord­ing to the Con­fer­ence Board, which tracks and reports con­fi­dence data, came in Decem­ber 1974, when the index was at 43.2.

January’s num­ber, the most recent avail­able, was 87.9. The last index released before Guthrie’s report was 90.5 for Decem­ber 2007.

Con­flict­ing infor­ma­tion, yes. Con­text and per­spec­tive also.

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