Comment by kasey_junk

I wasn’t talking about elections. Lowered consumer sentiment used to be predictive of lowered consumer spending (especially on no -essential expenditures). It’s decoupled now. And consumer spending was absolutely bonkers for years after the sentiment suggested it shouldn’t be.

Consumer sentiment used to be if not directly correlated to broader economic figures, directionally the same. That stopped being true.

And this has been beyond just single methodology reports. Commercial data and polls broadly said the same thing as the non-profit data and polls which broadly matched governmental numbers.

Some fundamental change has happened and if it doesn’t revert I think it’s going to be a big point of academic research for decades to come.