The Siena (College) Research Institute (SRI) recorded dipping consumer confidence in Syracuse, Binghamton, and Utica in the second quarter of 2012, according to survey results released today.
Overall confidence, which measures consumers’ willingness to spend, dropped 2.7 points in the Syracuse metropolitan statistical area (MSA) to 68.6. It fell 0.1 point in the Binghamton MSA to 65.8 and 4.9 points in the Utica MSA to 63.4.
The three areas have the lowest overall confidence readings out of nine MSAs in New York. They are also below the SRI index’s break-even point, which is just above 76.
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The break-even point is the index level at which consumers express an equal amount of optimism and pessimism. Index results above the point indicate mostly optimistic consumers, while results below the point reflect prevalent pessimism.
Only one other MSA in the state lost overall confidence in the second quarter: New York City. Confidence slipped 2.2 points in that MSA to 79.3 but still remained higher than anywhere else in the state.
New York state’s other five metropolitan areas all saw increasing consumer confidence during the quarter. The biggest jump took place in Albany, where consumers drove up their confidence index by 3.4 points to 78.7.
Looking at all nine of the state’s MSAs, the second quarter of 2012 was a mixed bag, according to Douglas Lonnstrom, professor of statistics and finance at Siena College and SRI founding director.
“It’s kind of like we’re moving laterally here,” he says. “And I don’t see anything in the infrastructure that’s going to cause us to dramatically go up or down. We just seem to be drifting along right here.”
SRI develops the quarterly confidence indexes by surveying consumers over the age of 18 with random telephone calls. Each MSA index is based on more than 400 respondents, with the exception of the indexes for New York City and Long Island. SRI calculates those quarterly indexes using averages of its monthly consumer-confidence surveys.
Contact Seltzer at rseltzer@cnybj.com
