Consumer Confidence Revisited

The average Joe will tell you that consumer confidence means “how confident people are about buying stuff”. However, I would like to disabuse the folks reading that still hold this idea.

The Consumer Confidence Index, in summary, is the average score of 5,000 households chosen at random of the following questions (voted positive, neutral, or negative):

1. business conditions
2. business conditions for the next six months
3. employment conditions
4. employment conditions for the next six months
5. family income for the next six months

Reports are gathered by a private organization called the Conference Board [1] and issued.

The Conference Board also releases economic forecasts and their website has information about more indicators including:

• Help-Wanted Online Statistics
• CEO Confidence
• U.S. Leading Index

I would advise anyone interested in knowing about these other indicators to go to the Conference Board’s website placed below.

[1]http://www.conference-board.org/