“Reassessing the Relationship Between Consumer Sentiment and Spending with a New Composite Index”

Chicago Fed letter, by Brave, Henken, and Jolley:

…we show how related daily measures of consumer sentiment can be used to correct for potential biases in the University of Michigan’s Index of Consumer Sentiment and construct a composite index—called the Composite Consumer Sentiment Index, or C-CSI—that correlates more closely with consumer spending.

The key graph:

Source: Brave, Henken and Jolley (2026).

Using this measure, consumer sentiment is actually fairly high, not much lower than early 2024.