A vibe check for this economy, courtesy the Conference Board’s U.S. Consumer Confidence survey, comes out this week. The last time it came out, in April, consumers’ short-term outlook hadn’t been so pessimistic since late 2011.
Which is weird, given the strength of economic indicators right now. For now, we’re not in a recession. But the vibes? The vibes are off.
We all learned the word vibecession back in 2022, in the relatively strong Biden-era economy. Consumers were cranky because they were still adjusting to all of those post-pandemic price increases, said Stanford University economics professor Neale Mahoney.
“It was just taking time for people to sort of digest the impacts of inflation,” he said.
In other words, the bad vibes had to do with trouble behind us. Mahoney said this time, consumers are pessimistic because they’re worried about trouble ahead.
“I think the fear of the future is corroborated by some other data, right? Like Walmart, other retailers have announced that they will increase prices,” he said.
Consumers are also confused about the future economy, said Camelia Kuhnen, a finance professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Kenan–Flagler Business School.
“There is this unbelievably high level of uncertainty with respect to what economic policies will actually be put in place in the near future to the medium term. And so it is very hard to be confident in the future of the U.S. economy when you have no idea about how international trade is going to happen,” she said.
Another reason consumer sentiment is meh? The high cost of borrowing, said Harvard economics lecturer Judd Cramer.
“Interest rates, how much they have to pay to borrow money on their credit cards, how much they would have to pay to get a mortgage,” he said.
None of those are included in measures of inflation.
“And because during the Biden administration, we saw mortgage rates shoot up a lot as we tried to deal with the inflation that really got consumers on edge,” Cramer said.
Mortgage rates are still relatively high today, but consumers may still find reasons to be cheerful.
Consumer sentiment has been falling for most of 2025. But Kayla Bruun, who looks at daily consumer data for Morning Consult, said it’s changing course.
“As we’ve seen, some kind of softening in trade stances and the deals announced with the U.K. and China, the trade war sort of de-escalating. We have started to see that cause some improvement in consumer sentiment,” she said.
Bruun said she does expect rosier consumer confidence data later this week.
