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The conventional wisdom is that the economy and a president's fate are closely tied. And for much of Biden's presidency, part of the story has been that despite a strong labor market and economic growth, views of the economy and President Biden's handling of it have been abysmal.
In the summer of 2022, the Consumer Sentiment Index, a University of Michigan survey with an almost 80-year history, hit an all-time low. In other words, Americans clocked worse feelings about the economy a year and a half ago than they did during the depths of the financial crisis.
A lot of that likely had to do with inflation, rising interest rates, and a declining stock market. Trends that, as of right now, have abated and even reversed. So what's happened over the past three years, and where are we headed? And what does all of that mean for November 2024? Here with me to discuss is Joanne Hsu, who directs the Consumer Sentiment Survey at Michigan that I mentioned, and is also a professor there. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having me.
Also joining me is Neil Mahoney, economics professor at Stanford University. His recent research looks at the effects of partisanship and inflation on perceptions of the economy. Welcome, Neil. Thank you for having me, Gail. Let's begin by laying out some hard numbers on the economy, just so we can start off by having some shared sense of the data.
American GDP growth in the last quarter was 3.3%. That is high, especially compared to the past decade plus. Last year, the inflation rate was 3.1%. The employment rate is at near all-time low of 3.7%. And
the Fed interest rate, probably not as rosy of a picture for those other numbers, is 5.25 to 5.5% compared with basically 0% when Biden took office. That is where things are today. Of course, they have changed significantly just in the summer of 2022. Inflation was nearly 9%. Nonetheless, that is where we are today. How would you describe sentiment in relation to those numbers?
The first thing I'll mention is that consumer sentiment is actually a lot stronger than it was a year and a half ago. We saw really enormous gains in sentiment just in the last two months. And that was, however, following about four months of stagnating sentiment.
And we're not the only study that shows that. There are a few different measures of sentiment that are showing the same thing. What had happened, I would say, over the course of 2023 was that consumers recognized that inflation was easing up, that inflation was slowing, but they were really reserving judgment, particularly in the fall, over whether that slowdown was actually going to stick or if inflation was going to come back. And it's only really in the last couple of months that consumers are starting to feel more confident that the inflation slowdown was, in fact, going to persist.
That being said, sentiment is still 7% below the historical average. And so consumers still aren't feeling great about the economy. About equal shares of consumers believe that the economy is going to improve or deteriorate over the year ahead.
You know, people feel a lot better than a year and a half ago when they were broadly all in agreement that the economy was tanking. But things are very different now. I think people do feel much more favorable than they did back then, but still not really great.
The index of consumer sentiment that came out most recently was 78.8, which was up quite a bit over December. You're about to release new numbers on Friday. Do you have any, can you give us any hints as to how consumers are feeling? Are we seeing, is the trend continuing? Yeah.
I unfortunately cannot reveal anything about Friday's data. Everyone's going to see that at this exact same time. But the preliminary data that we released almost two weeks ago, that's about two thirds of the month. So it gives us a pretty good indication. The
The sentiment between December and January or between November and January over the last two months surged 29 percent. The last time we saw a two month increase of that magnitude was in 1991 when the Gulf War was ending and the recession, a short recession at that time was ending. So this is really massive, the kind of improvement that we're seeing. But even despite this enormous improvement, still consumers are still feeling mixed about the trajectory of the economy. We started.
thinking about this issue sort of in earnest, like in the summer and the fall. And I think during that period, there was this massive gap between sort of what you would predict sentiment to be based upon the hard data
and what consumers were actually reporting in the UMichigan data, in the conference board data, to other pollsters. And so, you know, we ran these prediction models, I think journalists at The Economist ran these prediction models. Everybody was finding this large gap. That gap has closed.
In the last two months, as Joanne spoke about, I think probably because of reasons we'll talk about, because of reasons we may not fully understand. But I think that's where I am. So what are we talking about when we say consumer sentiment data? Our survey has been asking the Americans about consumer sentiment data.
for over 70 years at this point. And the really nice thing is that we have a very long, consistent time series. The index consists of five questions that assess people's perceptions and expectations, both for the macro economy as well as their personal finances. And so one of the neat things that happened over the last two months that makes the last two months of improvement so remarkable is that all five measures moved up together.
And it moved across all these different demographic groups. And that's actually quite unusual. Usually, historically speaking, some people might feel one way about their personal finances, but they might feel a little bit differently about the macro economy. And these last two months, we saw everything really moving together.
So you're asking folks like, okay, how do you feel about your own finances at home, your ability to pay your bills or buy things? And then also, how do you feel about the direction the economy more broadly is headed? Yeah, where do you think, how do you think the economy is relative to a year ago? How do you feel your personal finances are relative to a year ago? And where do you think the economy is going over the next year and over the next five years? And beyond these five questions, we also have
We continue interviewing people for another half hour, which gives us a lot of color about what's on people's minds and fleshes out their feelings and their expectations and their assessments of the economy. What is on people's minds?
well, inflation for number one, inflation slash high prices, absolutely number one. And one of the things that I think speaks to this disconnect that Neil was mentioning just a moment ago about how low sentiment was over the past year is that a lot of people are still really benchmarking how they're feeling about the economy back to 2019 prior to COVID. And so I think
over much of last year, collectively as a society, we were coming to grips that we weren't going to be going back to the pre-pandemic normal. And so we get a lot of comments about, you know, inflation has eased up, but still prices are so much higher than they were in 2019. We're not asking about 2019. When we ask people to look back, we ask people to look back a year. And so, you
You know, there's some collective reckoning about that, that, you know, four years on, you know, four years on since the beginning of the pandemic, we're just starting to really come to grips with that.
What Joanne is talking about is what motivated, I think, some of our analysis looking into how people's perceptions of inflation sort of decay over time. And so I think we were picking up sort of the same concern when we saw this gap between perceptions and fundamentals. People were saying, well, you know,
of folks' perceptions of the economy aren't going to improve until prices actually decrease. And they want to see prices come back down to 2019 levels. And that struck us as odd, right? If you look at basically price data since we've started collecting prices, prices have been largely monotonically increasing, maybe with the exception of the Great Depression.
And people eventually acclimate to the price level. When I go into a grocery store, I don't expect a bottle of Coke to cost a nickel, even if it costs a nickel for sort of a 70-year period that I have adjusted my expectations. But there's no reason why consumers need to adjust their expectations at the same rate we measure prices. When you look at
the inflation measures, they're looking at price changes over the last 12 months. But consumers may be still reacting to price changes that happened 13 months ago, 18 months ago.
I think when you start to think about perceptions in that way, it then naturally leads to, well, let's run analysis where we look at how consumers respond to price changes this year, price changes in the prior year, and price changes in the year before that, and to see sort of how the weight consumers place on price changes decays over time.
Yeah, so Neil, if you add up the three years of Biden's presidency so far, what you did, you get close in your analysis, you get close to about 20% inflation over the three year span. And of course, now it's down to sub 3%, which is great, but it was as high as almost 9% in the summer of 2022. How long, according to your modeling, should it take for Americans to digest, you know, 20% inflation over three years?
So when you look sort of at the historical patterns, it seems like the weight that consumers place on inflation over the last year is twice as much as the weight they placed on inflation over the year before that, which is twice as much as the weight they placed on inflation over the year before that. That is, the sort of rate of decay is about 50%. Another way to say that exact same thing is if there's an inflationary shock,
that you feel about one half of the impact in the first year, you feel three quarters of the impact in two years, you feel seven eighths of the impact in three years.
And so I think that perspective is very helpful in thinking about the present moment where there's been low inflation over the last year. But in the year before that, there was high inflation. This was summer of 2022 was the time when we had 8.9 percent inflation. And so, you know, if you take that perspective.
then where consumers are right now is they're still digesting the inflation from summer 2022. But as we move towards the November elections, that that inflationary episode will fall further into the rearview mirror and that consumers will be adjusted, acclimated to the new price level.
Can I throw a question out to Neil? Go for it. So one thing that we have found on the survey that's been a little peculiar about the current inflationary moment is the tenor of news that consumers are telling us about. So we have a question on the survey that asks, you know, what developments have you heard about in business conditions and, you know, favorable or unfavorable? And we ask them what topics specifically. And the share of consumers that tell us that they were hearing negative news about inflation,
was double what we were seeing in the late 70s and early 80s. Now, I'm not saying that's a causal relationship, right? Like people who are more concerned with inflation or whatever topic, they're going to gravitate to news sources that probably reinforce or speak to their concerns.
But, you know, of course, the news environment is totally different now, right? Like with not just social media, but with the much more rapid news cycle. So my question to you, Neil, is to what extent do you do you think that this decay may be slower as a result of this different environment now, informational environment now than in previous inflationary episodes?
I think it's a very important point that there's only so much you can learn from historical data. I think we all recognize we're in a new media environment.
I think a couple of points. One is I sort of completely agree. I think it would be interesting to look at, let's say, reporting of gas price increases versus gas price decreases over time and see what is the I think we all expect there to be a difference in airtime given to increases versus decreases. But how large is that? How has that evolved since, for example, the 1970s?
I guess I don't have sort of a strong prior on whether the new environment will lead to sort of a slower processing of inflation. It could be the case that
People reacted more strongly on the way up and, you know, will react more strongly on the way down as well. So the whole impact will be magnified, but sort of the rate on the way up and the rate on the way down will be the same. I think, you know, we're going to have to crunch the numbers a couple of years from now to know for sure.
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Let me just jump in here on behalf of the media and try to characterize the debate that we're having here, which is, is the economic sentiment that has been abysmal vibes-based or is it
hard data based. And I think that this is not just a debate that we're having on this podcast. It's a debate that has happened over the past two years or so in general. And I think that there are solid arguments on either side and that maybe as we progress through the coming year, if inflation rates remain low and interest rates do come down, we'll learn more about what was affecting perceptions of the economy. I mean, my view is the answer is almost certainly both.
that, for example, the increase in sentiment we've seen over the last two months is much too large to be driven by shifts in economic fundamentals. And so I think that that does point to the media environment, you know, the broader vibes as being important. On the other hand, you know, the
I think facts still do matter to some extent. And these historical patterns, I think, do teach us about the mapping between facts and perceptions. So I don't think we have to choose one side or the other. We can understand it's a complex environment where there are many causes.
When consumers are telling us about their personal finances and where they think the economy is going and how they're feeling about the economy, they're not basing it on money.
the most recent GDP release, and they never have been. They're not watching the CPI print. The CPI print comes out a month after the month's inflation that they already experienced. They are using their own experiences in the economy. And even when, you know, last year, when, you know, sentiment was really low, economy was humming along, GDP growth was continued to be robust.
When I would talk to random people on the street, like not the respondents on the survey, but, you know, colleagues, friends, people like, you know, my taxi driver, the person cutting my hair, you know, they would all tell me, you know, rich and poor, that they felt like they were struggling in this economy. There was barely anyone who, you know, even among economists who told me, oh, yeah, I'm feeling great about my budget.
And I'm feeling, you know, yeah, milk costs whatever dollars a gallon, but I feel fine. Like, I think that there was a lot of conversation about a disconnect. You know, I think people really were struggling and really continue to struggle with high prices. And I don't think that's a figment of their imagination.
Yeah, Joanne, since you're playing the field reporter in this role, let's swap and I'll play the data person and sort of make the argument that I see for why voters and Americans in general should have felt crappy about the economy, right? So, I mean, I think for me, the most illustrative chart is one that we've started to see repeatedly that shows you annual change in earnings versus inflation, right? And for almost the entirety of Biden's presidency...
prices have been rising faster than wages. I mean, when inflation reached nearly 9% in the summer of 2022, wages were only rising, you know, maybe close to 6%. So for much of Biden's presidency, Americans were quite literally losing purchasing power, like becoming poorer. Their wages went
did not go as far as they used to. And this is coming off of a period where not only were wages rising faster than prices for most of Trump's presidency, at the tail end of Trump's presidency, when the COVID relief induced a whole bunch of cash transfers to Americans, their wages, their income spiked
incredibly high. I mean, like during the end of Trump's presidency, wages spiked by like 8% while prices were actually fall or like almost falling or were experiencing 0% inflation. So folks went from, wow, I, you know, my budget looks great right now to quite literally becoming poor for almost three years. And that relationship has only changed somewhat recently, not even, not even a year ago, have wages started to rise faster and
than prices again. And so I think that's an important dynamic that we can focus on. On top of that, this is a dynamic that many Americans don't,
alive today just aren't familiar with. You know, you have to go back to the 80s to experience significant degrees of inflation that would make you stop and think when you're at the grocery store or when you're trying to buy a used car or what have you. And so, one, they're reacting to something that's real. And two, it may have been harder to swallow because it felt like it came out of nowhere because people had no context to understand it.
Yeah, I think that I think both of those things are in play. And and we can look at the, you know, not having context part a little bit, because we have people in our survey who were alive in the 80s, you know, high inflation, high interest rate periods. I mean, my own parents always laugh at me when I complain about it. Not to enforce millennial, not to enforce millennial bias here and pretend that no one was experiencing the economy in the 80s. But yes, good point. Good point, Joanne.
My point being that even the folks who were around then had really low sentiment as well. Like even those who knew that, oh, we're still only at single digit inflation. We have not. We are still in single digit interest rates. Like even they were still feeling pretty abysmal about the economy, about the economy last year. You know, I think collectively, just as I mentioned, that we're still coming to grips with
you know, we're not going back to 2019. We all had collectively enjoyed this long extended period after the global financial crisis of low interest rates, zero inflation, continuous growth, you know, that that got very quickly upended, not just the global pandemic. And so, you know, I think that we kind of lost the memory of that. At the same time, you know,
You know, Neil had mentioned the increases we've seen in sentiment over the last two months, a lot larger than fundamentals of those last two months would predict. I would note that
the four months, you know, four or five months of consumer sentiment being pretty low before that, I interpret as consumers reserving judgment. And so while things were improving, they were continuing to reserve judgment. And the last two months of improvement were pretty much putting us on the same trajectory as we were in coming off the all-time low that we hit in 2022. And I don't think the reserving judgment was unreasonable, right? Like... Well, especially after 2021, right? When everyone was like, oh,
Like, all right, the pandemic's over, the economy is going to take off. And then like, man, did sentiment plummet when we realized we were wrong.
Yeah. And we, you know, I think it makes sense to reserve judgment for a number of reasons. You know, when inflation came up, there was this debate raging among economists on is this is this transitory inflation or not? You know, how would we expect a layperson to really realize after the fact that is transitory? And on top of that, in the late 70s and the 60s and 70s, when we had several consecutive episodes of high inflation, inflation came down and then
not long after, it came right back up. So I don't think it's unreasonable for consumers to reserve judgment. Maybe they didn't need to reserve judgment as much as they did. I mean, we know that monetary policymakers were working really hard to manage expectations about how much they were going to be pulling all the stops to fight inflation. But I think my interpretation of what we're seeing recently is consumers finally feeling like, okay, we're on the right trajectory.
And maybe I'll just sort of layer in with, you know, I think the sentiment numbers are useful and important, but like we should think of them as responses to a survey that capture not just people's sort of ground truth, but they're an opportunity to be politically expressive. You know, not everybody picks up the phone. And I think to understand that
I think those numbers in that context is helpful. A couple things which relate to that, I think
One, and this is not the UMichigan numbers, I think it's other numbers, but if you ask people sort of what they think about their own personal financial situation versus what they think about the economy more broadly, we see this wedge where people tend to feel pretty good about their own situation but feel worse about the economy more broadly. And I think that wedge is naturally explained.
by on these broad questions, people reflecting the media they consume about the vibes or using it as an opportunity to express sort of their partisan views. Another thing that I think we should acknowledge is
these surveys do embed a huge amount of partisanship. Yeah, Neil, can you share that data with us? I know you tried to boil down how much of it was partisanship versus, you know, what you would expect given the underlying economic conditions. Totally. So something, you know, we were looking at when we were trying to understand this gap between fundamentals and perceptions is the role of partisanship. And so I think
Probably most of your listeners know that when control of the White House changes hands, that there are big shifts in how survey respondents of different political affiliations change their views. So when Trump came into office, Republicans were suddenly bullish on the economy and Democrats were more dour. When Biden came into office, those perceptions reversed.
What we didn't know, and I don't think was well known before we looked into it, is that these shifts in sentiment are not symmetric. And so when we looked at the data and we sort of crunched the numbers,
a bunch of different ways, we found that Republicans shift their views by plus or minus 15 points around a change in control of the White House, while Democrats shift their views by six points. The language we use in our piece is Republicans cheer louder and boo harder. And so when these responses are not symmetric, they don't cancel each other out.
And so in particular, it suggests that when a Republican is in the White House, that overall sentiment will be inflated. And when a Democrat is in the White House, it will be depressed. Why? Why do Republicans cheer louder and boo harder? So that's it's a good question, I think.
We don't have a definitive answer. I think a natural starting point would be maybe the media ecosystem that Republicans and Democrats are in have different amounts of partisanship. Maybe it's people who affiliate with different parties tend to be more or less expressive in
in responding to surveys. It could be some differences in survey response rates among people who associate as Democrats versus Republicans. I don't think we know for sure. What we can do with this fact, right, is if Democrats and Republicans are speaking at different volumes, that we can sort of adjust the dials so that they have equal voice.
And if you do that exercise, sort of naturally you get a improvement in sentiment. So it's maybe about one third of the gap between what you would expect and what we're having could be explained by this sort of partisan skew of what we call asymmetric amplification.
If I could go back in time, I would get this partisan, you know, political party identification question added from the very beginning. And unfortunately, we don't have it going all the way back. The survey measured it about once in administration, you know, prior to an election. And then in 2017, realized, you know, maybe we should be picking this up every month. And
And, you know, I think this work you've described, Neil, is really fascinating and really important to document. I do, when I look at these, you know, it's definitely the case, even with our limited data on political affiliation, that the partisan gap has grown. It's always been there, and it actually started growing under Obama. So it's not actually a totally recent thing. It's been, you know, and when I talk to my interviewers, they've been saying, they've been hearing this in the
spontaneous comments from people, you know, going back, going back, you know, over a decade now. And I will also add that, you know, partisanship or political identification
in some ways, is an outcome in itself, right? Like we do re-interview people after six and 12 months, and sometimes we do see shifts in where people identify. And so they may shift their identification in response to how the incumbent is doing with the economy. And also Republicans cheer louder, boo harder than Democrats could also reflect
how bad they think the other party is for the economy, right? Like if you are a Republican and you think Democrats are really terrible for the economy, you would boo harder, cheer louder. And if you're a Democrat who feels like
Democrats are a little better at the economy. Republicans are definitely worse, but not like tremendously worse. That could also be consistent with this. So just throwing out another possible explanation beyond the different possible explanations that we can't quite tease out yet. Yeah, Joan, I think that's a really good point in the sense that if we did really intensive consultations,
consumer sentiment data surveys on health care, like Democrats might cheer louder and boo harder than Republicans there because Democrats are the party that has the natural advantage on the issue of health care. And by and large, the majority of Americans feel like the Democratic Party performs better on the issue, where by and large, Americans feel like the Republican Party performs better on the economy across time, across different administrations. Yeah. I'll just...
add one thing, which is, you know, as we move towards a general election, I think it's easy to imagine that this sort of partisan sentiment that people are responding to surveys with sort of their voting hat on rather than their sort of economic analysis hat on, I think could be exacerbated. So it will be, I think, something to watch and something to be aware of as we interpret data over the next 10 months.
We're definitely already seeing that. And I mean, not precisely in the way you've described it, but in our questions about where is unemployment going to go up in the next year? Are business conditions going to improve in the next five years? Lots of people are saying, I don't know. Depends on the election. How can you ask me this? Depends on who's going to win. And we train our interviewers to tell people
You know, we just want one number. We don't want one answer if a Democrat wins and one answer if a Republican wins. And so what we're hoping they do, but we don't actually know how they're doing it in their mind, is, you know, to force—
fold into their expectations at this moment for how the election is going to resolve. But so, I mean, that's part of the reason it's really hard to predict, you know, where sentiment is going, how much is it going to help or hurt one candidate or the other, because people are updating all of their expectations every month leading into the election, depending on who they think is going to be in power by January. I think I completely agree. And
So where I am after sort of thinking about all these things is sentiment is a rich measure, which captures lots of different sort of factors in people's lives. And we should sort of interpret it as that, not just as this sort of pure measure of where sort of the economy is. We've got lots of measures of where the economy is. Exactly.
Yeah, I think, Neil, that was also one of the explanations for the gap in sentiment versus fundamentals, which was this sort of refraction of...
challenges people were facing, whether it was the pandemic itself or general dissatisfaction with politics or foreign wars, the border, whatever, were refracting all of that through how they were saying they were feeling about the economy when obviously, you know, they can be related but are also discrete issues. So let's take away all of that for a second. Are Americans better off today than they were 30,
three years ago. And when I say three years ago, I'm not asking about 2019, because I know that the economic data, if you compare it to from 2019 to today, has improved because you're including all of 2020 during most of which time Trump was president. But if you look at like, basically, January 2021, to January 2024, are Americans better or worse off?
What I wonder is, is that really is that the metric that voters are taking? Yes, we all know that Biden wasn't inaugurated until January 2021. And but I'm not sure if January 2021 is.
is a benchmark that people have in their minds. To be perfectly honest, I am quite surprised at how long and sustained this period of low unemployment rates has been, in spite of the fact that inflation needed to come down as much as it did. And so, you know, the fact that jobs continue to be
plentiful in many sectors. You know, in spite of a lot of news coverage right now about layoffs, you know, overall labor markets continue to be very strong. You know, I think no one can really dispute that. So I think of the January 1 exercise as sort of, or January 1,
20-whatever exercise as sort of an academic exercise. And even if that's where some of us would like to assess the current administration on, I'm not sure that people really are. Where do you see the economy headed and therefore maybe also sentiment between now and November 2024?
So, you know, the labor market is very strong with, you know, close to record low unemployment, you know, for Black and Hispanic individuals and sort of now wage growth that is faster than inflation. I think all of the indicators that we can look at suggest that the labor market will continue to be very strong in the year ahead.
that the Fed will cut interest rates, which, you know, to some extent are already baked into stock prices, but to some extent may lead to sort of a boost in the stock market, a lowering of interest payments. I've been looking at consumer finances. Consumer finances are a very important part of the economy.
normal, if not quite strong. So rates of delinquency and default across consumer loans are sort of below their sort of historical midpoints. So I think on all the data that I am tracking, the economy looks strong. I would pay close attention to the price of gas. That's a
maps pretty directly to consumers' views of the economy, to presidential approval ratings. And there are factors outside of anybody's control which influence the price of gas. There's a slowdown in China. I don't think a slowdown in China will have negative spillovers to the U.S., but it's something to pay close attention to. So I think those would be two risk factors that I would flag.
I'd flag a couple others that aren't necessarily more important. They're just other risk factors. One is the conflict in the Middle East. And, you know, if there's continued disruptions in the Red Sea to shipping and if it creates...
If it creates problems in oil markets and gas prices, as well as to supply chains more generally, I can see that affecting sentiment, especially if it starts feeding into gas prices or prices in general. And the other thing is budget discussions in Congress and in the federal government. Sentiment has fallen prior to...
debt ceiling crises and has risen after those crises have been lifted, at least temporarily. It also dips ahead with a shutdown of the federal government. And so we know that
You know, Congress, Republicans and Democrats in the White House are under negotiations right now on funding the federal government. So if that does not resolve itself, that could be another factor. I don't think it would affect sentiment in any sort of long term way, but certainly a risk factor for the year ahead. All right. Well, we will keep tracking all of this. Thank you, Joanne and Neil. Thank you so much. Thank you, Galen. It was fun to be on.
My name is Galen Droop. Tony Chow is in the control room. Our producers are Shane McKeon and Cameron Chertavian, and our intern is Jayla Everett. You can get in touch by emailing us at podcasts at 538.com. You can also, of course, tweet at us with any questions or comments. If you're a fan of the show, leave us a rating or review in the Apple Podcast Store or tell someone about us. Thanks for listening, and we will see you soon. Bye.
