You bet the economy’s great — if you’re a Twitter founder.
The rest of us? Not so much, we think.
Consumers were spooked by the direction of the economy in October, according to the monthly Discover US Spending Monitor.
In fact, the consumer-confidence numbers dropped to two-year lows, with 57 percent of respondents polled in the monthly survey saying that the economy was getting worse, a 9 percentage-point increase from the previous month. The poll’s benchmark confidence number fell by 3.8 points, to 87.9 points, in October.
Consumers with children “were the biggest driver of pessimism,” Discover officials said. Some 63 percent of respondents with children at home felt economic conditions were getting worse. That’s compared with 54 percent with no kids at home, according to the poll. And the percentage of consumers who think the economy is good or excellent declined by 2 percentage points, to 15 percent, Discover said.
These numbers represent “significant” one- month drops, said poll spokesman Matt Towson. He noted that in the previous few months the numbers had been “stagnant.”
Were October’s bad numbers the result of the government shutdown and the ObamaCare signup woes?
“Possibly — there was a lot going on in October,” Towson answered. “November will now be very important because people are planning for the holidays, and we will see if these numbers were a one-month blip or part of a trend.”