The Consumer Sentiment Index from Reuters and the University of Michigan was released Friday morning. The trend through August has been overall positive posting sentiment gains. The consumer sentiment reading for mid-September came in at 84.6, against a Bloomberg estimate of 83.4 and a Dow Jones estimate that was slightly lower at 83.0. The previous sentiment level read at 82.5 for late August and the mid-month reading was 79.2.
Current economic conditions fell to 98.5 and the sentiment’s inflation expectations fell to 3.0% from 3.2%.
An article on CNBC showed that the survey director Richard Curtin had this to say about the current reading:
All of the early September gain was in the Expectations Index, while consumers judged current economic conditions slightly less favorably than in August. Although consumers anticipated a slowdown in employment growth, (they) expected the highest rate of growth in their wages in six years.
Consumer expectations increased to 75.6, against a forecast of 73.0. The late-August expectations index had a reading of 71.3, which was up from its mid-month reading of 66.2.
As a reminder, we consider the University of Michigan sentiment reading less than a 100% accurate measure of broader sentiment. That is simply due to the size of the pool of responses, but not necessarily about how the data are tabulated. The Conference Board’s consumer confidence reading is more representative of the broader sentiment, but it released much later each month, so this consumer sentiment reading can actually make for a broader market move than the more accurate reading.
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