{"id":257832,"date":"2025-09-27T04:30:13","date_gmt":"2025-09-27T04:30:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/257832\/"},"modified":"2025-09-27T04:30:13","modified_gmt":"2025-09-27T04:30:13","slug":"tariff-policy-highly-salient-remains-drag-on-mood-of-inflation-weary-consumers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/257832\/","title":{"rendered":"Tariff policy ‘highly salient,’ remains drag on mood of inflation-weary consumers"},"content":{"rendered":"

(TNND) \u2014 American consumers are feeling “pretty subdued about the trajectory of the economy,” despite a better-than-expected report this week on economic growth<\/a>, according to the director of the University of Michigan’s long-running consumer sentiment survey<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Joanne Hsu, the survey’s chief economist, said the dour mood is “pretty broad-based.”<\/p>\n

They perceive some weakness in the path of business conditions, inflation, unemployment, and their personal finances,” she said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

September\u2019s final consumer sentiment reading, released Friday, was \u201c55.1.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a small dip from 58.2 last month.<\/p>\n

To put the current consumer sentiment index reading of 55.1 in context, the index\u2019s reading only dipped below 90 once in the three years before the pandemic.<\/p>\n

The reading hit a record low of 50 in June 2022, at the peak of pandemic-induced inflation.<\/p>\n

Consumer sentiment bumped up to an index reading of 74 in December, following the election.<\/p>\n

But sentiment declined quite a bit in the first four or five months of the year, closely tied to tariff policy.<\/p>\n

All five index components got worse this month.<\/p>\n

And Hsu said really the only exception to the soft consumer sentiment is among those with robust stock holdings, due to the continued strength of the stock market.<\/p>\n

She called tariffs a \u201chighly salient\u201d issue for consumers.<\/p>\n

We have over 60% of consumers who are spontaneously mentioning tariffs during the interviews,\u201d Hsu said. \u201cWe’re not prompting them to mention anything about them. They’re just bringing it up on their own, and it’s very rare to see this many people bring up a single topic.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Consumers don’t think we’re out of the woods with inflation, and tariffs appear to be adding to that price anxiety.<\/p>\n

The Yale Budget Lab said the effective tariff rate<\/a> is now the highest since 1935.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the University of Michigan\u2019s survey found year-ahead inflation expectations at 4.7%, a slight improvement from the 4.8% price inflation that consumers expected a month earlier.<\/p>\n

The current actual rate of inflation<\/a>, as measured by the consumer price index, is 2.9%.<\/p>\n

“What’s most concerning from my perspective are the labor market expectations, because this is a pretty major difference between now and the 2022, \u201823 period after the pandemic when sentiment was also pretty low,\u201d Hsu said.<\/p>\n

Over 60% of consumers expected unemployment to get worse, she said.<\/p>\n

And people are more worried they\u2019ll get laid off, she said.<\/p>\n

The labor market has cooled significantly, with U.S. employers adding just 22,000 jobs last month<\/a>. The unemployment rate ticked up to 4.3%.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"(TNND) \u2014 American consumers are feeling “pretty subdued about the trajectory of the economy,” despite a better-than-expected report…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":257833,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[64,38444,4052,79,37510,27912,135550,2437,36779,2179,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-257832","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-economy","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-consumer-sentiment","10":"tag-economic-growth","11":"tag-economy","12":"tag-inflation-expectations","13":"tag-personal-finances","14":"tag-price-anxiety","15":"tag-stock-market","16":"tag-tariff-policy","17":"tag-unemployment-rate","18":"tag-united-states","19":"tag-unitedstates","20":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115274385887657154","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257832","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=257832"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257832\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/257833"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=257832"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=257832"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=257832"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}