If you've seen the media ballyhooing today's positive consumer sentiment report

[progree]

understand it's the media's job, at least as they see it (get clicks and in some cases also boost Krasnov), to make something out of essentially nothing.

Consumer Sentiment preliminary December (upticks from 51.0 to 53.3. But still a minus 28% YOY change -- the latter not in any headlines I've seen)
https://www.sca.isr.umich.edu/

Nothing like a graph to put it in perspective --
10-year chart:
https://www.sca.isr.umich.edu/files/chicsr.pdf


The month-over-month (dotted line) moved up a fly-speck amount that you can clearly see if you zoom in on a large display and use a magnifying glass

The 3-month moving average (solid blue line) actually continued to fall, as what entered the 3-month window was lower than what left the window

And they both are about the worst they've been in the 10-year period covered by the graph.

For the 50-year perspective:
https://www.sca.isr.umich.edu/files/chicsh.pdf
Considerably worse than the housing bubble burst and dot com bust
Even worse than the worst of the Reagan double-dip recession

ETA - a collection of headlines, per Bing search
https://www.bing.com/news/search?q=consumer+sentiment+confidence+in+december&FORM=HDRSC7