Economic Forecasts and Equity Impacts in Light of Consumer Confidence | Episode 114 | 03-26-2024

Prepare to uncover the economic insights that could sway your investment perspective, as Megan Horneman of Verdence Capital Advisors offers her analysis on March's consumer confidence report. The unexpected dip in confidence and its potential repercussions on spending behavior is a must-hear for anyone keeping track of the economy's impact on the equity markets.

This episode of Markets with Megan is packed with crucial takeaways as we discuss the factors contributing to consumer apprehension, including the outlook on job growth and income levels. Megan also previews important upcoming economic data releases that could sway the markets. For insights that could shape your financial future, you won't want to miss a moment of Megan's engaging discussion.

Well, another month, another volatile number in consumer confidence that we received here for the month of March. Hi, I'm Megan Horneman, the Chief Investment Officer for Verdence Capital Advisors, coming to you today with our regular segment of Markets with Megan, and we want to discuss the consumer confidence report that we got for the month of March from the conference board. The headline number was a bit worse than expected and lower than the prior month. The weakness was primarily led by expectations on the future of the economy. This is concerning for us for what consumers may do from a spending capacity if they are concerned about the future of the economy. When you dig in a little deeper to that expectation component, we saw weakness in those that were surveyed with their expectations on what their job growth prospects would be, and that's interesting because we've had some pretty solid months of job gains. But now we're seeing consumers actually getting concerned about what the employment market may look like in the next six months, and what's even more concerning to us is that they are concerned about income levels. This should pull some of the spending back that we've seen has been so resilient over the past year. This is starting to filter into what these surveys are saying and we think it should start dictate into spending for the consumer. This goes along with everything that we've talked about the concern over the economy for the rest of this year, bit of over-optimism in the equity market, given our view on the economy, and we think that volatility can pick up because people will get a little bit more realistic of what kind of economic environment that we are in.

We'll be back tomorrow. We get a couple pieces of economic data. Before the long weekend We'll get the final reading on fourth quarter GDP as well as the final reading on the University of Michigan, consumer confidence and then pending home sales. Thanks so much for joining. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to reach out to podcast at verdence dot com. Thank you.