Live from Las Vegas…
… Airport! 
Viva!
Which is a great place for “people-watching” and losing money on the slots…. I’ll update this if I get a chance to play.
Yup, I tiptoed across the California state line again. 😉
Maybe I should have called this entry Great Expectations!
According to CNN Money, a key measure of consumer confidence made a MUCH GREATER than expected increase in August. A New York-based business research group, The Conference Board, said today that its Consumer Confidence Index rose to 54.1 in August from an UPWARDLY revised 47.4 in July.
You gotta believe!
Economists were expecting the index to increase to 48 (according to a Briefing.com consensus survey), which is why they call economics “the dismal science.” (Actually, bad predictions are NOT the reason, and in all fairness to the practitioners of economics, any field of study that includes the results of human behavior is less like a “science” and more like the banks of slot machines immediately ahead of me!)
Historically, this index is now at a low level. An overall reading above 90 indicates that the economy is solid, and a score of 100 or above indicates strong growth. The index is based upon a survey that was mailed to a representative sample of 5000 households in the U.S.
The percentage of respondents who expected more jobs in the next six months rose from 15.5% to 18.4%. Those who said that jobs are “hard to get” decreased from 48.5% to 45.1% in August, and those who said that jobs are plentiful increased from 3.7% to 4.2%!
People who expected business conditions to improve over the next six months increased from 18.4% in July to 22.4% in August, and folks who expected business conditions to worsen slipped from 19% to 15.8%.
I’ll TAKE it!
The soaring of “consumer” confidence is, of course, essential to an economic recovery in the same way that a “positive attitude” is essential to most (non-negative ) human endeavors.
Let’s go with the flow this time.
Back to the people-watching….
-Bill at Cheshire Cat Photo™
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