The University of Michigan Final Consumer Sentiment for June came in at 98.3, up 0.2 from the May Final reading. Investing.com had forecast 99.2.

Surveys of Consumers chief economist, Richard Curtin, makes the following comments:

Consumer sentiment retreated in late June to just above the May reading largely due to concerns about the potential impact of tariffs on the domestic economy. The falloff in confidence was minor, as the Sentiment Index has been virtually unchanged for the past three months. The persistent strength has been due to favorable assessments of jobs and incomes. While consumers anticipated rising interest rates during the year ahead, those expected increases were associated with a modest decline in longer term prospects for the national economy. For the year ahead, consumers still anticipated that the economy would produce small additional declines in the unemployment rate as well as higher wage gains. Consumers also anticipated an uptick in inflation during the year ahead, partly due to rising energy prices and partly due to tariffs. [More…]

See the chart below for a long-term perspective on this widely watched indicator. Recessions and real GDP are included to help us evaluate the correlation between the Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index and the broader economy.

To put today’s report into the larger historical context since its beginning in 1978, consumer sentiment is 14.3 percent above the average reading (arithmetic mean) and 15.6 percent above the geometric mean. The current index level is at the 88th percentile of the 486 monthly data points in this series.

Note that this indicator is somewhat volatile, with a 3.0 point absolute average monthly change. The latest data point saw a 0.2 percent change from the previous month. For a visual sense of the volatility, here is a chart with the monthly data and a three-month moving average.

For the sake of comparison, here is a chart of the Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Index (monthly update here). The Conference Board Index is the more volatile of the two, but the broad pattern and general trends have been remarkably similar to the Michigan Index.