Economic Confidence Plummets

Economic confidence has taken a nosedive in the last few days, reaching its lowest three-day rolling average since December 2011.

Gallup Results for the latest Gallup poll are based on telephone interviews conducted Oct 1-3, 2013, on the Gallup Daily tracking survey, with a random sample of 1,542 adults, aged 18 and older, living in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3 percentage points.

That’s according to Gallup’s daily economic confidence index, one of the few datapoints that has captured economic conditions since the government shutdown began on Tuesday. The nadir over the last five years was in late 2008 and early 2009, improving over the next several years before plummeting in summer 2011. Summer 2011, mind you, was the last time we had a major debt-ceiling crisis.

Here’s what happened to confidence then, based on some other competing metrics of economic sentiment charted in a recent Treasury Department report:

Treasury Department.

Gallup’s Economic Confidence Index is based on the answers of survey respondents to two questions, asked daily: one about current economic conditions and another about whether the economy is getting better or worse. About 15 percent of Americans say the economy is in excellent or good shape, with 43 percent saying it is poor. On the second question, 67 percent say the economy is getting worse.

By the way, one of the other current economic datapoints we have available is this lovely Slate analysis of Facebook emoticons by city. Looks like a lot of Washington-area Facebook users have turned their ’s into ‘s.