UMich consumer sentiment improves to 59.1 in December

Yahoo Finance Live's Julie Hyman breaks down UMich consumer sentiment data.

Video transcript

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BRIAN SOZZI: Hey, welcome back on this Friday morning. I'm Brian Sozzi hanging out here with Julie Hyman. Brad Smith is on assignment.

Markets, well, they're limping into the weekend. We're seeing some downbeat action in all three major indices on that hotter-than-expected Producer Price Index reading this morning.

But Julie, over to you with some breaking news on the consumer front. And interestingly, losses in the markets accelerated after this hotter-than-expected--

JULIE HYMAN: Did they? I thought they decelerated?

BRIAN SOZZI: I had it pick up just a little bit. Nonetheless, breaking is a good sign.

JULIE HYMAN: All right, lets talk about the number. 59.1 is the University of Michigan's consumer confidence figure for December. This is the preliminary read for December. That is better than the 57 that was estimated. Current conditions coming in better also, as were expectations.

Now, all of these numbers, as the survey of consumers director Joan-- Joanne Chu points out in the release, all of this is showing a recovery of most of the losses from November. But still low from a historical perspective. Still, all components of the index were higher. One year business conditions were up 14%. Long-term business conditions up about 6%.

People are still seeing inflation, right? They're still concerned about higher prices. They improved, right? They moderated, but still relatively high. 4.6% in December, which is the lowest reading in 15 months. So these numbers are showing, you know, like it's not like everything is--

BRIAN SOZZI: And now the markets are--

JULIE HYMAN: --fantastic.

BRIAN SOZZI: --coming back. But we try to read a little bit of everything into markets. But--

JULIE HYMAN: Yes.

BRIAN SOZZI: --it's good to see this in-- right in the smack in the middle of holiday season.

JULIE HYMAN: Yes, it is.

BRIAN SOZZI: That's the good part. That's a good thing.

JULIE HYMAN: So consumer sentiment is improving. And I think, you know, what you just said, I want to repeat what Luca Paolini of Pictet said earlier, which is that you can't just look at these single-- yes, of course, the market is going to react to these single data points. But you do have to look at the ensemble of the data to try to get a more full picture here.

And it's still a murky picture right now to be sure. But the surprising consumer strength-- I mean, even many of the CEOs who we've heard from this week at various conferences, who have said, we could be heading into recession. Many of them still highlighted surprising consumer resilience. And so perhaps that's what's reflected here in this survey.

BRIAN SOZZI: And it's surprising. Look, you had RH CEO, last night, Gary Freeman, on his earnings call saying, the housing market is collapsing. It startled me. It shook me a little bit. So much, I had to write a story about. It's on our homepage.

JULIE HYMAN: Oh, all right, well, we'll have to read that story.