Economic Confidence Reaches Multi-Year High
With unemployment falling, and most gauges of consumer confidence having ticked up recently, it is not unusual that the Gallup economic confidence level would reach a four year high. This runs back to January 2008, when most Americans were not…
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U.S. economic confidence improved to -17 in the week ending March 25 from -21 the prior week. Economic confidence is now by one point at the highest weekly level Gallup has recorded since it started Daily tracking of confidence in January 2008.
If confidence drive more confidence, an improvement in consumer attitudes should help retail activity, and thus much of the overall economy. Hopefully, this causes jobs additions as productivity reaches a breaking point at firms which begin to expand with their sales.
The only immediate threat the the Gallup trend is gas prices, which are close $4 nationwide for a gallon of regular. Many experts believe the prices is near a tipping point were it may significantly undermine consumer activity.
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Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.
McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.
His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.
A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.
TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.
McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.
