Sudden Debt submits: This post is inspired from Tuesday's
Conference Board press release, announcing that the Consumer Confidence Index for April jumped to 54.9 from 40.8 in March. Here is a relevant passage: "Continued gains in the Present Situation Index indicate that current conditions have moderately improved, and
growth in the second quarter is likely to be less negative than in the first" (italics added).
Now, what the heck kind of language is this? It certainly doesn't qualify as proper English, since "negative growth" is an outright oxymoron. What the establishment's perennial cheerleaders are attempting is to couch their statements in as anodyne a language as possible. It wouldn't be as obfuscatory and deceiving to simply say, for example: "The US economy is in decline but next quarter it may drop a bit less fast".
In any case, the context is entirely misleading. The Present Situation Index hardly budged: it increased from 25.5 to 28.9. The headline index moved sharply up almost entirely because the Expectations Index rose from 51.0 to 72.3. In other words, HOPE. (By the way, that's the broad category under which "green shoots" appear, as well.)
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