Latest / Markets with Megan: A Quick Financial Markets Update / Confident… or Just Confused? | S2 E083 | 09-30-25

Transcript

Confident… or Just Confused? | S2 E083 | 09-30-25 · Markets with Megan: A Quick Financial Markets Update

• 0:00
  Megan: Sentiment among consumers just keeps going back and forth.
• 0:03
  Megan: It's Tuesday, September the 30th, and this is Markets with Megan.
• 0:06
  Megan: If you like this podcast, please you can subscribe, hit that alarm bell.
• 0:10
  Megan: You can always share it with your friends, any family members or colleagues that might find this interesting.
• 0:15
  Megan: But as always, we're here to break down that economic data that we're see or that we receive on a regular basis and what it means for the economy, what it means for the Fed, and what it means for your wallets.
• 0:25
  Megan: Today we're here to talk about the September reading on consumer confidence.
• 0:30
  Megan: And unfortunately, we saw this weaker than expected across the board.
• 0:34
  Megan: So consumer confidence, the headline reading, fell to a five-month low.
• 0:39
  Megan: When you look at consumer sentiment on the current situation of the economy, that fell to a 12-month low.
• 0:46
  Megan: And when you look at the expectations for the future, consumer confidence fell here to a three-month low.
• 0:53
  Megan: Now, where was this concentrated?
• 0:55
  Megan: It's primarily in their concern about the labor market.
• 0:59
  Megan: There's an indicator that's called the jobs plentiful minus the jobs hard to get.
• 1:05
  Megan: So when that number's declining, that means that consumers think there's less jobs available out there and they're harder to get.
• 1:13
  Megan: So right now, that level fell substantially.
• 1:15
  Megan: It fell to the lowest level since February of 2021.
• 1:20
  Megan: So consumers are suggesting that jobs are much harder to get than they have been since 2021.
• 1:26
  Megan: What's also interesting is when you break down these confidence numbers by income range, this is no longer weakness at the lower income level.
• 1:34
  Megan: The biggest decline for the month of December was actually in those incomes over 125,000.
• 1:41
  Megan: This, in our opinion, is a negative for consumer spending.
• 1:45
  Megan: We keep seeing these weak numbers, and it's not contributing to the monthly sales numbers that we see.
• 1:51
  Megan: But if you look historically, consumer confidence and spending do have a pretty high correlation.
• 1:57
  Megan: So we may be going into a challenging fourth quarter of the of this year from a spending perspective.
• 2:04
  Megan: That's all we have here.
• 2:05
  Megan: It's uh if you if you'd like a history of our podcast, you can go to marketswithmegan.fm.
• 2:10
  Megan: Thank you.