Storms, North Korea, Trump, Americans keep calm and shop

WASHINGTON: Consumer sentiment in the US is riding high on a tide of good economic news, despite political turmoil at home and inflamed geopolitical tensions abroad.

Analysts say consumers remain confident despite catastrophic storms, deepening political alienation, violent marches and talk of war - things that might otherwise make households cut spending and hunker down for safety - because such events are far from their day-to-day economic lives.

“In the past year, there has been a long list of issues that could have derailed consumer confidence, including the unprecedented partisan divide, North Korea, Charlottesville, as well as the hurricanes,” Richard Curtin, chief economist at the University of Michigan’s Surveys of Consumers, said Friday in a statement.

Curtin released the university’s twicemonthly index of consumer sentiment, which slipped 1.6 points between August and September but remained elevated even though three hurricanes had struck US territory in the space of a month.

“Confidence has nonetheless remained very favorable,” he said.

In the first nine months of the year, the index even hit its highest level in 17 years.

“One of the reasons Americans can be optimistic is the extent to which many of these events have not affected what they are able to do and what they are not,” Frederick Wherry, a professor of sociology at Princeton University, told AFP.

According to Edward Berkowitz, professor of history and public policy at George Washington University, the deadly violence at a far-right march in Charlottesville, Virginia in August was “not a major enough event to influence the national psyche or interrupt economic trends.”

Consumers do have reasons to be optimistic. — AFP