Yahoo Finance’s Julie Hyman and Brad Smith discuss a preliminary consumer sentiment reading for April.
Video Transcript
BRAD SMITH: We do have some breaking economic data coming out right now.
JULIE HYMAN: We do. I'm going to do a consumer confidence first from the Conference Board for April coming in at 101.3. That is worse than the 104 that economists were estimating, and it's worse than 104 that we saw in March as well. This is interesting because a lot of the recent consumer data that we've seen, at least the confidence front, has been trending a little bit better, so it's interesting to see this one miss estimates. It looks like the present situations index is coming in at 151.1. Expectations falling though, and that perhaps is the reason for the shortfall in the overall number coming in at 68.1. So interesting numbers there.
And then we also got new home sales. Those beat estimates. New home sales at an annual pace of $683,000. That is an increase of 9.6% month over month, and that is an unexpected increase, we should say, as well. $632,000 is what economists were looking for on that front. So I guess overall what this continues is the trend of mixed data when it comes to-- when it comes to economic data not giving us a lot of clear direction here about, you know, how people are feeling and what they're doing. Although I guess they are buying new houses.
BRAD SMITH: Yeah, well-- and I'm not in that number just yet, but hopefully one day soon. But one thing that was interesting within the Conference Board assessment here and of US consumer confidence, the decline in April that we saw, while consumer's relatively favorable assessment of the current business environment improved somewhat in April, their expectations is noted here that it fell and remained below the level, which often signals a recession looming in the short-term. That coming from the senior director of economics at The Conference Board. In a statement they say that consumers became more pessimistic about the outlook for both business conditions and labor markets here.
So you factor in the employment situation more broadly and start to think about, OK, what will the Fed look to in terms of the employment data that they've seen come through, which we already got the last reading on a jobs-- a monthly jobs report prior to their next FOMC meeting. So it's a larger question of how the Fed is going to assess the employment environment as well in tandem with where consumers are seeing their own [? prospectives ?] kind of lining up right now.
JULIE HYMAN: If we look at the markets in reaction to this data, we're not seeing a lot of movement one way or the other. Stocks are around the [? lows ?] [? of ?] [? the ?] [? session, ?] particularly if you look at the S&P down about a half of 1%. But doesn't seem to be necessarily reacting to this-- these reports in particular.