Weekly Market Recap – December 29, 2025

Consumers may have felt more generous this holiday season but they haven’t felt more joyful. Two key measures of consumer attitudes, the University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index (Sentiment) and the Conference Board Consumer Confidence Index (Confidence), remained bleak in December as assessments of current business and labor market conditions continued to deteriorate. Both Sentiment and Confidence show a longer trend of weakening consumer attitudes, and are down 29% and 19%, respectively, over the past year. However, this weakness has been far more apparent in the UofM Sentiment data in recent years.