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Have consumers finally realized the economy is pretty good?

Here's an interesting chart I ran into a couple of days ago:

The University of Michigan has long been the gold standard in consumer sentiment surveys, but Goldman Sachs has its own consumer sentiment index that it constructs by monitoring Twitter on a daily basis. As you can see, the two measures are usually pretty close.

But if I'm reading this chart right, the Goldman Sachs index suddenly skyrocketed in the month of June. The UMich index didn't.

What's going on? And if the Goldman Sachs index is correct, what on earth happened in June to cause a sudden bout of good cheer from consumers? Has the reality of a strong economy and low inflation finally had an impact?

I dunno. Stay tuned.

13 thoughts on “Have consumers finally realized the economy is pretty good?

    1. MattBallAZ

      This. The people on Twitter are a small small fraction of the populace. They got much richer lately as the market has hit new records.

      1. kahner

        sure, but the stock market has been trending up for almost 2 years, this divergence in sentiment indexes just started in june.

  1. gibba-mang

    I think people started to pay attention to the economy and discovered that the economy wasn't just inflation of 2021 - 22.

  2. SwamiRedux

    Have consumers finally realized the economy is pretty good?

    Meh. The view on the right that Biden has tanked the economy isn't going to change. Who you going to believe--Trump, or facts?

  3. rick_jones

    As you can see, the two measures are usually pretty close.

    Are they? Apart from 2018-2019 it seems one or the other is consistently above or below the other by a meaningful amount.

  4. jeffreycmcmahon

    I would expect that the new Muskified Twitter would be a lot less reliable for everything, including economic indicators.

  5. D_Ohrk_E1

    Birdsite's lost any predictive value. It's now filled with self-important folks who believe their voices matter along with sports fans and news junkies who fear a loss of information from leaving the platform.

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