The Conference Board estimate of consumer confidence comes out tomorrow. Here’s some guesses on how bad it’ll be.
Figure 1: Reported Conference Board Confidence (bold black), nowcast (light blue square), +/- 1 std error (light blue +), Bloomberg consensus (red square). Source: Conference Board, author’s calculations.
I used a 2022-26 regression of first differenced confidence on U.Mich sentiment, growth rate of gasoline price, and lagged confidence (adj-R2 = 0.28) to nowcast March confidence. The point estimate is 86.6 (with very wide standard errors), while the Bloomberg forecast is 88.
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