Gallup: U.S. Economic Confidence Weak, but Steady Above Recent Lows

Traditionally I have not been a big fan of polls, but I've been reasonably impressed with the wide range of data that Gallup shows on its web site. Maybe it was always really just the media's cherry-picking, selective display, and biased presentation of polling data that I was really objecting to. Going "right to the horse's mouth", I find the raw Gallup data a lot more refreshing and enlightening than what the media typically reports.

 

One headline on the Gallup web site right now is:

U.S. Economic Confidence Weak, but Steady Above Recent Lows

Which is basically telling us that after a steep decline in July, confidence has stabilized and actually risen a little.

 

You can check out the daily changes in a wide variety of data with the "Gallup Daily" box and see how volatile confidence really is. Of course, you can't sense the trend from those fluctuations, but you can click on each item and see the data plotted over time, which also gives you a feel for the volatility over time. You can even request a downloaded spreadsheet of the data for your own analysis.

-- Jack Krupansky