Consumer sentiment hits three-year low

Marketplace

American Public Media

Business, News

4.6 • 8K Ratings

🗓️ 7 November 2025

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Consumer sentiment — as in, how everyday people feel about the economy — fell to a low not seen since 2022, according to the University of Michigan’s Surveys of Consumers. The decline was consistent across demographics, except among the wealthiest Americans (as measured by volume of stock market holdings). In other words, economic mood just became another k-shaped indicator. Also in this episode: Colleges shutter satellite campuses to cut costs and small and midsize businesses shrink their headcounts.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	with apologies to peter drucker for the paraphrase can you manage the labor market
0:06.8	if you don't measure it from american public media this is market place i'm car rindal. It is Friday today the 7th of November. It is always to have you
0:26.6	long, everybody. It should have been Jobs Day today. As you know, it wasn't, as you also know.
0:32.8	What nobody knows up to and including one Jerome Powell is where we go from here in deciphering where the economy might be going.
0:42.4	That's where we're going to start. We're going to do it with Heather Long. She's a chief economist at Navy Federal Credit Union.
0:47.5	NCD Breedy. He's the Washington Bureau Chief at MSNBC. Hey, you two.
0:51.9	Hi, okay. Heather Long, you get to start today.
0:54.5	And here's what I want to know.
1:12.7	It's sort of a, it's a, it's a zeitgeisty sort of, you know, Schadenfreude, sort of, I don't even know what kind of question. We're not getting all this data. What are we, what are we losing? What don't we have because we don't have this data? Oh, you just want to start with the depressing stuff.
1:13.1	Okay.
1:11.8	Sure. losing. What don't we have because we don't have this data? Oh, you just want to start with the depressing stuff. Okay. So, sure. Look, look, nothing can replace government data. We've got a lot
1:18.8	of good alternative indicators, but, you know, let's just think big picture, 163 million workers in
1:24.7	this economy, 170 million people in the labor force from the top of
1:29.0	Alaska down to what is the most southernmost point of the United States.
1:32.9	Key West, hello, Key West. All right. So you get the point. No one, no private sector data has
1:39.2	that kind of visibility into this great nation. I will say when I look and step back and look at all the data we did
1:45.7	get this week, I think the Chicago Fed new metric probably has it best. You know, they said,
1:51.8	Saul said unemployment rate ticked up just barely to 4.4 percent from 4.3 the last time we did
1:58.7	get a jobs report. And they said hiring was down a little bit.
2:02.1	So basically what I'm seeing is something that continues to deteriorate slowly.
2:07.7	Oh, just give me another like 30 seconds on that slowly thing, because that was a weird place to end.
2:14.3	All right. Yeah, I mean, look, it's been frozen, no hiring all year, basically outside of
	...

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