Although we talk quite a bit about the monthly consumer confidence index put out by the Conference Board, the pollster Gallup monitors something similar, with a daily index called the Economic Confidence Index. According to Gallup, the year is ending on an upswing: the readings for the week of December 11, at -39, are the highest they've been since July.
The bad news is that the current reading is still lower than it was at this time last year, when the figure was -32. The big issue that drove down Americans' economic confidence was the battle over the debt ceiling, when the entire country risked a default; that crisis raged most of the summer, and was resolved at the first of August. The Economic Confidence Index, at -34 toward the beginning of July, dropped to -54 by the end of August. It's been climbing ever since.
That's a good trend to have going into the New Year, but we're really just getting back to the post-recession norms. Before the crisis this summer, the Economic Confidence Index had been moving in a fairly narrow band between -20 and -40 since the recession ended in 2009. What we really need is for it to get back to positive territory.
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