Wednesday, July 29, 2009

The New Consumer Confidence Index?

September '08 was Lehman...
March '09 was the market collapse...
The question... what is the concern now????



Source: Google with fixed scaling (via Reddit)

Update: KMH with a great explanation:
I suspect a red herring. Related terms like "Great Depression" are not spiking, whereas they did last year.

My guess: Earlier this month Larry Summers pointed to the fact that the search term "economic depression" had declined in usage as evidence of economic recovery. It wouldn't take a large fraction of curious or vindictive Summers observers googling his favorite search term to generate a spike, especially when "economic depression" is almost certainly not the first term most people would bang into Google during a panic. Perhaps somebody even wrote a bot to do it just to make Summers squirm - genius!

Irrespective of the cause, I wouldn't be surprised if it still turns out to be a great leading indicator...

4 comments:

  1. I suspect a red herring. Related terms like "Great Depression" are not spiking, whereas they did last year.

    My guess: Earlier this month Larry Summers pointed to the fact that the search term "economic depression" had declined in usage as evidence of economic recovery. It wouldn't take a large fraction of curious or vindictive Summers observers googling his favorite search term to generate a spike, especially when "economic depression" is almost certainly not the first term most people would bang into Google during a panic. Perhaps somebody even wrote a bot to do it just to make Summers squirm - genius!

    Irrespective of the cause, I wouldn't be surprised if it still turns out to be a great leading indicator...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Is there a trust index that would allow us to compare the level of trust the average joe has in banks, politicians, financial advisors, media, employers, priests, etc. and the percentage change up or down that has occurred over the last two years? My guess is that if there is the level of trust is cruising in on empty and for many the word hope is just that--a word.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I think kmh nailed it. Related terms are simply not rising.

    Too bad, I was going to guess something like "1/6th of all working Americans out of work or having severely restricted pay". But, turns out they're not thinking of deflation, or depression. Go figure.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I agree with kmh, it has to be an artefact... an artefact created by Obama → http://www.inquisitr.com/29576/economic-depression/

    ReplyDelete