Surveys capture narratives that may not fully reflect reality. Today, this is on full display in Americans’ views of the current U.S. economy.

The holidays have always been a time of higher-than-normal consumer spending. However, a drift downward in spending at this festive time of year has been occurring for years. This is likely a function of many things, the most important of which may be the decline in the number of children in the United States.

For all the sophistication of modern asset markets, at their core, they are still just Keynesian beauty contests. Keynes’s metaphor for the markets derived from a special type of beauty contest where the judges don’t pick who they think is most attractive, but who they think will be most attractive to all the other judges. His intuition is that traders are mainly trying to anticipate what the average trader thinks the average trader thinks is about to happen. Such nested logic can generate wild volatility in the market’s response to the silliest peices of news. This has been proven yet again in the waning days of 2023 with a big jump in equity and bond prices, all because of the odd notion that there has been a sharp pivot in Federal Reserve policy. The market now anticipates that the Fed will lower interest rates multiple times next year.