Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. After all of the hullabaloo yesterday about consumer confidence, Bespoke Investments had a nice piece on what has happened in the past after large drops in consumer confidence. Their chart is reproduced below. (For a link to the entire article, click here.)
Source: Bespoke Investments
Suffice it to say that consumers tend to panic near the lows, not at the highs. This is a nice piece of data visualization and really makes it clear that consumer confidence is a lagging indicator, not a leading one.
