Well, howdy there, Internet people, it's bell again.

So today, we're going to talk about Trump, confidence, and great recession levels.

Recently, when answering a question, I said one of the things to watch to see if we were headed towards recession, was the Consumer Confidence Survey.

Well, the numbers for April are out and, well, they're not good at all. They're actually remarkably bad, really bad.

Okay, so I know we've covered this in the past, but just a quick recap on what this is.

The conference board does this survey survey which results in three indexes, the Consumer Confidence

Index, the Present Situation Index, and the Expectations Index.

They're well titled and pretty self-explanatory.

They provide a lot of insight into how people feel about the economy.

Remember, facts don't care about your feelings, but the economy does. The way you feel

shapes your spending, and therefore the economy. The Consumer Confidence Index fell by 7.9 points in April to 86.0. That's the fifth straight month of

decline, and it has now reached levels not seen since the beginning of COVID. Digging into the

numbers, you find the percent of consumers expecting less jobs over the next six months was 32.1%.

That's almost as bad as April 2009, the middle of the Great Recession.

Stephanie Guasar, senior economist Global Indicators at the Conference Board, said, quote,

In addition, expectations about future income prospects turned clearly negative for the first time in five years,

suggesting that concerns about the economy have now spread to consumers worrying about their own personal situations.

If consumers are worried about their own situation,

they might spend less, leading to a contraction of the GDP. The present situation index only

fell about 0.9%. That's not horrible, and if it wasn't part of a multi-month trend, wouldn't even be worth

mentioning. But then we come to the big one, the expectations index. This is the one that people

pay attention to as an indicator of future recession. Generally, people view any number below 80

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