How Do Americans View The Economy?

Our Consumer Sentiment Index, which is used in our election forecasts.

🔃 April 18th, 8:27 AM: With tariffs (and consequently, the stock market) all over the place this week, we got an even worse figure in last week from the University of Michigan CSI, which is now even closer to COVID-19 recession levels. Our index has dropped to -9.4, its worst value yet. We are working on backtesting the CSI as far back as we possibly can to better contextualize the current values, and you can now switch between viewing the CSI over just Trump’s term or as far back as we have data.
A positive value should indicate that Americans are confident in the economy and feel good about spending, while a negative value indicates consumer concerns.
Our aggregate index uses three independent indices and applies a weighted average to output a final value:
- The University of Michigan’s Survey of Consumers CSI (Next Update - 4/25)
- The Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Survey CCI (Next Update - 4/29)
- Gallup’s Economic Confidence Index (Next Update - TBD?)