Latest / Markets with Megan: A Quick Financial Markets Update / Consumer Confident or Cautious? | S2 E098 | 11-25-25

Transcript

Consumer Confident or Cautious? | S2 E098 | 11-25-25 · Markets with Megan: A Quick Financial Markets Update

• 0:00
  Megan Horneman: Consumer confidence is showing us it might not be that cheerful of a holiday shopping season.
• 0:05
  Megan Horneman: It is Tuesday, November the 25th, and this is Markets with Megan.
• 0:09
  Megan Horneman: If you like this podcast, please subscribe, hit that alarm bell, share it with friends, family, or colleagues.
• 0:14
  Megan Horneman: But we're here today to report on some of the economic data that we've received.
• 0:18
  Megan Horneman: Now we came earlier and talked about the retail sales report, but remember that was from the month of September, because that is a government issued report.
• 0:27
  Megan Horneman: We're able to get some of these private reports for confidence, and we did get the November reading for consumer confidence.
• 0:34
  Megan Horneman: It's telling a different story than what we saw on retail sales.
• 0:38
  Megan Horneman: In fact, um, it came in much weaker than expected.
• 0:42
  Megan Horneman: And it was the if you look at the expectations component, which we like to look at to give us an idea of future spending, because typically, if you're concerned about the expectations of your income of the economy, you're not going to buy big ticket items or you're going to pull back on some spending.
• 0:58
  Megan Horneman: We did see that decline.
• 1:00
  Megan Horneman: It's actually in a sitting at the lowest level.
• 1:02
  Megan Horneman: Um, aside from the drop we saw in April, it's the lowest level since 2013.
• 1:07
  Megan Horneman: Now, inflation expectations, they were relatively unchanged.
• 1:11
  Megan Horneman: That's a good thing.
• 1:12
  Megan Horneman: Um, you did see a slight tick higher in the median expectation for inflation over the next 12 months at to 4.8%, and that was up from 4.6%.
• 1:23
  Megan Horneman: Again, it's not moving significantly, but that does still tell us that inflation is a concern amongst investors.
• 1:31
  Megan Horneman: When you look at the labor differential, and this is something the Fed will be looking at, if you look at the jobs that are plentiful in the economy, so that's what consumers think, or there are plenty a lot of jobs out there for you to get, minus the consumers that think there's jobs hard to get.
• 1:47
  Megan Horneman: That's called the jobs plentiful minus jobs hard to get index.
• 1:51
  Megan Horneman: That actually declined, and that's been hovering now since the lowest level we've seen since the pandemic.
• 1:56
  Megan Horneman: So job prospects are weakening, and that could have an impact on what we're seeing in the consumer confidence data.
• 2:03
  Megan Horneman: Now, to wrap this up on the consumer today, what we saw was September data very lagged because of the shutdown.
• 2:10
  Megan Horneman: We are seeing some softening there.
• 2:12
  Megan Horneman: Consumer confidence keeps just falling off a cliff.
• 2:15
  Megan Horneman: This is likely going to lead the Fed to cut interest rates in December.
• 2:19
  Megan Horneman: We saw the expectations of that interest rate cut jump up to over 80%.
• 2:24
  Megan Horneman: And um we've seen the equities like that news that uh softer economy means lower interest rates and maybe can refuel the economy going into 2026.
• 2:33
  Megan Horneman: That's all we have today.
• 2:34
  Megan Horneman: If you want a history of our podcast, you can go to marketswithmegan.fm.
• 2:37
  Megan Horneman: Thank you.