Latest / Markets with Megan: A Quick Financial Markets Update / Economic Forecasts and Equity Impacts in Light of Consumer Confidence | Episode 114 | 03-26-2024
Transcript
- 0:02Megan Horneman: Well, another month, another volatile number in consumer confidence that we received here for the month of March.
- 0:07Megan Horneman: Hi, I'm Megan Horneman, the Chief Investment Officer for Verdence Capital Advisors, coming to you today with our regular segment of Markets with Megan, and we want to discuss the consumer confidence report that we got for the month of March from the conference board.
- 0:21Megan Horneman: The headline number was a bit worse than expected and lower than the prior month.
- 0:26Megan Horneman: The weakness was primarily led by expectations on the future of the economy.
- 0:31Megan Horneman: This is concerning for us for what consumers may do from a spending capacity if they are concerned about the future of the economy.
- 0:38Megan Horneman: When you dig in a little deeper to that expectation component, we saw weakness in those that were surveyed with their expectations on what their job growth prospects would be, and that's interesting because we've had some pretty solid months of job gains.
- 0:54Megan Horneman: But now we're seeing consumers actually getting concerned about what the employment market may look like in the next six months, and what's even more concerning to us is that they are concerned about income levels.
- 1:05Megan Horneman: This should pull some of the spending back that we've seen has been so resilient over the past year.
- 1:11Megan Horneman: This is starting to filter into what these surveys are saying and we think it should start dictate into spending for the consumer.
- 1:18Megan Horneman: This goes along with everything that we've talked about the concern over the economy for the rest of this year, bit of over-optimism in the equity market, given our view on the economy, and we think that volatility can pick up because people will get a little bit more realistic of what kind of economic environment that we are in.
- 1:37Megan Horneman: We'll be back tomorrow.
- 1:37Megan Horneman: We get a couple pieces of economic data.
- 1:40Megan Horneman: Before the long weekend We'll get the final reading on fourth quarter GDP as well as the final reading on the University of Michigan, consumer confidence and then pending home sales.
- 1:49Megan Horneman: Thanks so much for joining.
- 1:51Megan Horneman: If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to reach out to podcast at verdence dot com.
- 1:55Megan Horneman: Thank you.