Three copies of the same chart landed in my inbox in a single week. A rising line for federal debt held by the public, denominated in trillions of dollars. A falling line for manufacturing employment, denominated in millions of workers.…
Why the Consumer Confidence Index Is a Sentiment Measure, Not a Prediction
Once a month, on the last Tuesday, The Conference Board asks roughly 3,200 American households five questions about the economy. The answers get converted into a diffusion-style index with 1985 set to 100, published at 10:00 a.m. Eastern, and within…
Why the Consumer Confidence Index Is a Sentiment Measure, Not a Prediction
The Consumer Confidence Index (CCI), published monthly by The Conference Board, records how a rotating sample of a few thousand U.S. households describe current business and job conditions and what they expect six months ahead. Its two published components, the…
Why Most Election Night Graphics Mislead More Than They Inform: A Chart Autopsy of Animated Maps and Probability Cones
November 5, 2024. Millions of us sat through the same ritual: county-level returns filling in across a national choropleth map, color bleeding across state lines in real time. The visual metaphor was doing a lot of heavy lifting. It implied…
Why the Consumer Confidence Index Is a Sentiment Measure, Not a Prediction
The Consumer Confidence Index, or CCI, comes out every month from The Conference Board. It is one of the most quoted U.S. economic indicators. It is also one of the most consistently misread. The index is a sentiment measure: a…