27th
Reader comment on Clusterstock.com:
Matt Damon (URL) said: May. 26, 2:51 PM
What’s spurring this little uptick? The Consumer Confidence Index. What exactly is that? Shockingly (I know - I’m stunned too), Consumer Confidence isn’t the slightest bit empirical and has exactly zero ties to any real economic metric or data point. It’s purely an opinion poll, as Wikipedia explains:
How Consumer Confidence is Measured. “The survey consists of five questions on the following topics: i) current business conditions, ii) business conditions for the next six months, iii) current employment conditions, iv) employment conditions for the next six months, v) total family income for the next six months.
After all surveys are collected, each question’s positive responses are divided by the sum of its positive and negative responses. The resulting relative value is then used as an “index value” and compared against each respective monthly value for 1985.” So someone being a tiny bit positive would canceled out by someone else being insanely negative. It’s a “yes/no” question, not a “by how much” question.
Basically, what this Consumer Confidence report is saying is that the media is successfully convincing people that the economy is going okay, and that the spin machine is in good working order. And that people aren’t willing to admit that they’re hopeless - they may very well be hopeless, but when the voice on the phone asks them, gosh-darnit they’re going to be patriotic and optimistic and say they think things will get better!!
That’s it. It doesn’t measure even one tiny piece of real empirical fact-based data.
