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Many are making a big deal about this release about two hours ago ... don't
*US JUNE CONSUMER CONFIDENCE 109.7; EST. 104.0
I have always been very skeptical of economic surveys. Most people do not understand what they are asking or how to answer it. So, they often use a proxy to answer this question, like AI stocks boomed last month or gasoline prices plunged recently.
So, I've called consumer sentiment "the world's most useless indicators." We don't need another indicator to tell us what happened last month; we can look it up.
The chart below shows the history of the University of Michigan Survey (started in 1952, orange line) and the Conference Board Survey (started in 1969, blue line). The black rectangle shows that these two surveys diverge more than ever, further undermining their usefulness. This divergence started with the pandemic.
My takeaway is that consumer confidence is so hard to measure that those slight changes in the wording or the collection methodology (phone versus email versus snail mail) produce wildly different results.
This is not a comment on the state of the economy. Rather it is a statement that I know nothing more about the economy now than I did one minute before this survey was released.
Some light reading from Stanford
AI Index Report 2023 – Artificial Intelligence Index https://t.co/mJuMDaxV4I
The tl;dr version with pretty charts
https://t.co/QITH2FptUE
A 15 & 19 year old raised a 20m venture fund from their private school bathroom and backseat of dad’s Range Rover.
I decided there was no need for diligence or concern.
@datarade Kumar, I'm with you the sec needs to step it up. The small floats with closet hodlers and the weekly options can drive these stocks up as shorts are afraid to stand on the others side. The is another HUGE that we can talk about offline