Consumer Confidence Falters

After rising for four straight months, the preliminary July confidence figure from the University of Michigan and Reuters delinted. While we won't get the final measure for two more weeks, the index fell more than 6 points and will definitely be lower than June even with potential revision.

I wrote previously about the increased volatility in this measure and how announcing a "recession" causes it to spiral downward. If we look at volatility than the previous four months are encouraging. The last time the index rose for four straight months was as the 2001 recession ended. There was a fall then but much less than today. Furthermore, the decline in this recession has been much more dramatic and will likely still take quite some time to recover to pre-recession levels.

Private Sector Competes on Recovery

Sometimes the best discoverys are mistakes. This one's getting added to that group.

Hoping to pick-up on traffic headed for recovery.gov, the government run clearinghouse for everything about the recent stimulus bill, the business-government partnership facilitation firm picked up a nice piece of web real estate: recovery.com


The firm lists information about specific projects funded by the stimulus bill and offers to connect firms that will try to access those funds with the proper government agencies. The stimulus bill was designed to create counter-cyclical spending but no doubt spending used to lobby/bid for government funding will be lambasted as wasteful, even though they create jobs. So despite comments that "jobs are jobs" we really do care where they are created.

The site is also putting out some easy to follow figures for tax payers. The chart below compares the stimulus spending to the overall spending typically given to each state.

Source: Recovery.com

The small size of the stimulus funding relative to the state's regular appropriations gives some credibility to Paul Krugman's argument that its just too small. Although, the stimulus money is in addition to, not a substitute for, all that regular funding.

I take the spending as a case that it may do more rather than not enough good. If the stimulus gave out huge funds to programs like unemployment insurance states could face problems readjusting to pre-stimulus levels.