For the third time in four months, consumer confidence declined in September, and the 3.7 point drop is the largest of those three declines. How do we reconcile this apparent loss of swagger in the context of apparent resilience in hard spending data? In a year defined by trade wars and uncertainty, economic indicators have been prone to some head-scratching revisions. Last week's revisions to second quarter GDP, for example, revealed an economy growing faster than first reported with the newfound strength largely coming from an improved assessment of consumer spending growth, specifically spending on services. We ... (full story)