How Much Will Reported Confidence Decline In March?

The Conference Board estimate of consumer confidence comes out tomorrow. Here’s some guesses on how bad it’ll be.

Figure 1: Reported Conference Board Confidence (bold black), nowcast (light blue square), +/- 1 std error (light blue +), Bloomberg consensus (red square). Source: Conference Board, author’s calculations.

I used a 2022-26 regression of first differenced confidence on U.Mich sentiment, growth rate of gasoline price, and lagged confidence (adj-R2  = 0.28) to nowcast March confidence. The point estimate is 86.6 (with very wide standard errors), while the Bloomberg forecast is 88.