108.7 vs. 99.5 (Bloomberg consensus). Is positive economic news percolating into surveys? From the Confidence Board today:
Figure 1: UMich Consumer Sentiment (blue, left scale), Consumer Sentiment adjusted per Cummings-Tedeschi (red, left scale), and Conference Board Consumer Confidence (black, right scale), Bloomberg consensus (light blue square, right scale). NBER defined peak-to-trough recession dates shaded gray. Source: University of Michigan via FRED, Conference Board, NBER.
Taking into account the adjusted UMich Consumer Sentiment index (per Cummings and Tedeschi (2024) discussed here) and the Conference Board Consumer Confidence index, consumer assessments of the economy are noticeably brighter than in previous readings.
The change in the Confidence index is pretty large (which is interesting when taken in addition to the positive revision to the September value).
Figure 2: Change in Conference Board Consumer Confidence demeaned and normalized by standard deviation 2016-2024M10 (blue). NBER defined peak-to-trough recession dates shaded gray. Source: Conference Board, NBER and author’s calculations.
The normalized change is 1.4 standard deviations – over a period marked by substantial movements.
Finally, with these readings, the link to news sentiment is re-established to some degree.
Figure 3: UMich Consumer Sentiment adjusted per Cummings-Tedeschi (red), and Conference Board Consumer Confidence (black), and Shapiro-Sudhof-Wilson/SF Fed News Sentiment index (thru 10/27) (green), all demeaned and normalized by standard deviation. NBER defined peak-to-trough recession dates shaded gray. Source: University of Michigan via FRED, Cummings-Tedeschi, Conference Board, SF Fed, NBER and author’s calculations.
Addendum:
GS provides a comparison of UMichigan Sentiment index (unadjusted), Conference Board Confidence Index, and their in-house Twitter index.
Source: Hatzius, et al. “USA: Job Openings Below Expectations in September; Consumer Confidence Well Above Expectations,” Goldman Sachs Global Investor Research, October 29, 2024.
Gains in all three main indices were largest for Republicans and moderate for independents, while Democrats were less happy by all three measures. This is yet another month of the U. Michigan data reflecting partisan sentiment.
https://data.sca.isr.umich.edu/
Kevin Drum offered a post on how job openings have returned to more normal levels after being sky high. He got a nasty comment about not using this ratio from someone who could not be bothered to provide the actual data (sound familiar). Well – here it is from the BLS. And yea the ratio of unemployed to job openings has risen from 0.5 to 0.9 of late.
https://www.bls.gov/charts/job-openings-and-labor-turnover/unemp-per-job-opening.htm
My Fellow Republicans, It’s Time to Say Enough With Trump
By J. Michael Luttig
Judge Luttig was appointed by President George H.W. Bush and served on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit from 1991 to 2006.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/29/opinion/donald-trump-oath.html?unlocked_article_code=1.V04.XaMn.AdZJxeNuANua&smid=url-share
We Americans live in faith with our Constitution and with the past generations of Americans who swore to protect it and fought to defend it. One week from today, we will decide whether Donald Trump is fit to be president of the United States again. He is not. When we entrusted our Constitution and our democracy with him before, he betrayed us. Campaigning for the presidency again, he now promises to exact vengeance against his fellow Americans whom he deems “the enemy from within,” those who have dared to challenge his betrayal, an enemies list that includes Republicans and Democrats alike. There could be no higher duty of American citizenship than to decisively repudiate a man who betrayed the nation when he was previously entrusted with the highest office in the land and now threatens the persecution of American citizens who have crossed him. In the almost 250 years since the founding of the nation, no president before Donald Trump has ever so betrayed America.
This is not a difficult decision for voters, though my fellow Republicans and conservatives will finally have to decide what they have long hoped they would never have to decide — whether to put their country above their party. Republicans and conservatives have always proudly claimed they would be the first to put the country above all else when the time came. That time has come. If Republicans are unwilling to put America before their party now, they will never do so. They must be honest with themselves.
All Americans, but especially Republicans, will live with their decision the rest of their lives. This election is anything but politics as usual, no matter how desperately Donald Trump and the G.O.P. have tried to make it that. As a lawyer and a judge, I have devoted my entire life to America’s democracy, Constitution and rule of law. I took solemn oaths to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign as well as domestic. While most Americans do not literally take oaths to preserve and defend the Constitution, all Americans freely assume those same oaths and they should take their obligations seriously every single day of their lives without any reservation. The reason America is still the envy of the world after almost two and a half centuries is because so many of its citizens do take seriously their obligations as citizens. The powers of the presidency are vast and its responsibilities commensurately immense. It is for those reasons that a president has no higher obligations than to America’s democracy, Constitution and rule of law, the foundational cornerstones of our republic. Through his words and deeds, Donald Trump has over and again demonstrated his palpable contempt for those cornerstones of America’s grand experiment in democratic self-government. He has proved himself to be an anti-democratic, anti-Constitution candidate for the presidency of the United States.
I am 70 years old and I have always voted for the Republican candidates for president because I never doubted they would honor their sacred obligations to our democracy and our Constitution. I have never doubted the Democratic candidates for the presidency would honor their obligations, either. But today, I do not recognize the Republican Party that I have known across my lifetime. It is not the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln or Ronald Reagan and neither is it conservative, as that term has been inspiringly invoked by conservatives since the founding. Today, the party of Lincoln and Reagan stands only for one man and that man’s disfigurement of both republicanism and conservatism.
As I wrote in August when I endorsed Kamala Harris for president, Mr. Trump drove a stake through the heart of America’s democracy and Constitution on Jan. 6, 2021, inciting insurrectionists with his speech on the Ellipse and other actions in an attempt to overturn the presidential election he knew he lost to Joe Biden and prevent the peaceful transfer of power for the first time in almost 250 years.
For his grave offenses that dark January day nearly four years ago, he will forever have the ignominious distinction of being the first American president since the founding to be charged with crimes against the United States. With the assistance of a willing Supreme Court, he succeeded in delaying trial and accountability for his betrayal of the nation until after this election. Now, as he wished, he will never be held accountable for his offenses unless the American people first hold him accountable at the ballot box on Nov. 5. Yet, to this very day, the former president; his running mate, Senator JD Vance; and much of the Republican Party persist in the fraudulent claim that the 2020 election was stolen from them, and in breathtaking defiance of American democracy and the Constitution, that they can be trusted to ensure a peaceful transfer of power only if Donald Trump wins. That is not democracy and the rule of law. It is autocracy and lawlessness. Respect for the electoral will of the American people and for the peaceful transfer of power are central tenets of our constitutional self-government. Without unhesitating adherence to those fundamental tenets of our Republic by every person who assumes the presidency, America would have neither democracy nor rule by law. Its Constitution would be meaningless words, not magisterial commands. Its greatest strengths would be its terminal weaknesses.
America’s democracy and the rule of law are the only truly consequential stakes in the 2024 presidential election. Yes, there are important policy issues about which we disagree. But that has always been the case and always will be. In this election, these policy differences are comparatively inconsequential, if consequential at all. It is our democracy, Constitution and rule of law that have made America the envy and the beacon of freedom to the world for almost a quarter of a millennium, and on the eve of the 2024 presidential election Donald Trump stands as an imminent danger to those foundational cornerstones of our nation. Ms. Harris is the only candidate who can be trusted to honor the president’s sacred obligations to America’s democracy, Constitution and rule of law. The vice president understands and cares about what Donald Trump does not. She calls on Americans to “stand up for the rule of law. For our democratic ideal. And for the Constitution of the United States.” She believes we “have the power to chart a new way forward, one that is worthy of this magnificent country that we are all blessed to call home.” America has never heard those words from Donald Trump. And it never will. The choice for America next Tuesday could not be clearer.
Trump will speak at Allentown, PA tonight. It has a large Puerto Rican population so I’m sure Trump will attract a large crowd. Only thing a lot of the people who will be there plan to protest the racist Donald Trump!
Off topic – election stuff:
A number of numerate people have made the point that the outcome of the election now underway is not so much close as it is highly uncertain. Here’s one example, from Josh Marshall:
“We keep hearing that this is the closest election in decades…At least 5 of the 7 swing states are within a single percentage point… National poll averages are between one and two points — right on the cusp of where most believe a Democratic Electoral College victory becomes possible. But I don’t think that’s the right way to look at it. What we have is a high uncertainty election… There’s every chance that most or every race that looks close will veer more or less uniformly in one direction. And that wouldn’t necessarily be because of one late-breaking story, some great decision by one of the candidates or even undecideds all “breaking” in one way. It could simply be because the dominant understanding of the race and the electorate was just a bit off and had been all along.”
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/uncertain-but-not-necessarily-close
Stated more simply, the polls show the presidential race is close, but the polls are probably wrong. We just don’t know which direction they’re wrong. What’s true for the presidential race may also be true for House and Senate races – we don’t know. Efforts to correct forecasting errors in recent presidential elections are probably quite different from efforts to improve House and Senate forecasts, so we don’t even know if House and Senate races are as uncertain as the big show (this is my one point of disagreement with Marshall).
What happens on election night? I don’t know what exit polling is being done for early voting, which has been heavy, so I don’t know whether news outlets can reasonably declare a winner based on exit polling. Mail-in voting is expected to be lighter than 4 years ago because we aren’t freaking out about Covid now, but mail-in counting could delay results and is opaque to exit polling.
The bigger the margin in electoral votes, the earlier the results can be known. The bigger the margin, the less reason there is to worry about Trump’s vile shenanigans. Either he’ll have been beaten by enough votes that holding up any one state’s results won’t matter*,or he’ll have won. Sure, there would likely be violence and legal action and money raising in response to a Trump defeat, but there is a good chance the actual outcome of the election will be clear.
*That’s assuming Jesus doesn’t show up to count California’s votes.
consumers like being in a recession then!
you yanks should imitate us down under. We have an independent electoral commision which ensures NO gerrymandering and also ensures a free and rair electoral count.
We do not have electoral colleges which make a joke of democracy either.
mind you we do have convicted criminals running for office!
“mind you we do have convicted criminals running for office”
All the best countries do.
Whoopsy I meant we do not. We aussies can pick BS artists a mile out and when you combine that with the grift it is easy. and we aint even talking about creating an insurrection to stay in power when you have lost an election