Vacation plans held up

The deeper account

The Conference Board's survey closed on 23 September and was published at ten o'clock on Tuesday. Its index of consumer confidence fell 6.7 points, to 81.9, against the 89.2 economists had expected — the lowest reading since April 2014. The part that measures how people see the present fell 7.9 points, to 109.3; the part that measures what they expect fell 5.9, to 63.6, for the third month running, well below the 80 that the Board treats as a warning of recession. The share of people who said jobs were plentiful was the lowest since February 2021 and the share who said they were hard to get the highest since January 2021. Written-in references to prices, and to oil and gas prices in particular, "rose to new heights". And the share of consumers who said their family's finances were bad rose past the share who said they were good — the second time that has happened since the question was introduced four years ago. "The Consumer Confidence Index deteriorated notably in September, following two prior months of softening," said Dana Peterson, the Board's chief economist. Further down the release, among plans to buy cars and homes that slipped, was the sentence this page is named for: "Despite the general pullback in planned services spending, vacation plans held up, with 42.6% of consumers planning a vacation in the next six months—up 0.5 ppts over August." The increase, it added, was limited to holidays at home; plans to travel abroad dipped.

The S&P 500's first print of the day, 7,699.60, was its highest. By the end of the first minute it was 7,690.05, and for the next hour and a half it hung around Monday's close of 7,683.69: twenty-six of those minutes closed above it and the rest below, and it crossed the line twenty-five times. At ten, when the survey and the government's count of job openings came out at the same moment — 7.097 million in August, fewer than expected — the index rose 6.28 points in a minute, to 7,682.80. It made its last crossing at 10:58. In the half hour from 10:56 it fell 27.30 points, for no reason this page could find, and it drifted to 7,653.55 at 13:16. At two o'clock John Williams, the president of the New York Fed, told an audience at the University at Buffalo that one more rise in rates "may be appropriate late this year", but that "with the policy action we took at our September meeting, there is no need for urgency." The index rose 9.47 points in that minute, the largest one-minute rise of its day, and by 14:41 it was at 7,682.33 — 1.36 short of Monday's close, the nearest it came after eleven. It closed at 7,670.84, down 12.85. Traders, by Reuters' account, pared what had been heavy bets on a rise at the Fed's October meeting and priced a single rise this year, most likely in December.

Carnival had reported at 9:15, before the market opened: the most revenue it has ever taken in a quarter, deposits for voyages not yet sailed up nearly seven percent on the year before's record, and, for the whole of 2027, "both booked occupancy and pricing are at record levels". The shares opened 10.16 percent higher and never went back below $24.00; they closed up 13.41 percent, $4.07 billion of market value. Royal Caribbean rose 7.45 percent, $4.84 billion; Norwegian 3.42. The Wednesday and Thursday before, 23 and 24 September, Royal Caribbean and Carnival had been at their lowest prices of the past year. Target said it was cutting prices on nearly 2,000 home, apparel and accessory products before the holidays, and fell 1.26 percent; Walmart fell 1.78.

On Monday night Bill Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, wrote on X: "We are Simplifying Mortgage Pricing following feedback from lenders and consumers. Instead of two separate pricing grids, which makes zero sense, Fannie and Freddie are hereby moving to ONE PRICING GRID with VantageScore joining the existing FICO Classic pricing grid." The two companies stand behind about seven in ten American mortgages, and for decades the FICO score was the only one they took. Until Monday, by HousingWire's account, a VantageScore was marked down twenty points before it was priced; now both scores go through the same table. Rocket Mortgage said it would make VantageScore its preferred model for every eligible loan. Fair Isaac opened 20.55 percent lower, touched $595.19 and closed at $617.87, down 26.52 percent and $4.82 billion — the worst performer in the S&P 500, and the worst day for the stock in the feed's record, which begins in January 2008. It is 63 percent lower than it was at the start of the year. Equifax, TransUnion and Experian, the three credit bureaus that own VantageScore, all fell too, by between 1.80 and 3.40 percent; this page does not know why.

The Dow fell 131.59 points to 51,349.92 and the Nasdaq Composite 22.84 to 26,797.54; both reconcile exactly with this book's own Monday closes. Four of the eleven sectors rose, led by utilities, up 1.17 percent; energy fell 0.90 as crude slid — the oil fund lost 4.44 percent — on Saudi Arabia's resumed pipeline exports and fresh talks between American and Iranian officials through mediators. The thirty-year Treasury yield rose to 5.62 percent, its highest since 2002, and the ten-year stood about 5.26. The semiconductor fund rose 1.19 percent and the regional banks fell 1.02. Gold rose. The VIX finished at 16.04, three hundredths lower.

It was the twelfth session of 2026 whose opening print was the highest of the day — and the sixth of September's twenty, after the fourth, the eighth, the ninth, the eighteenth and the twenty-third. The first eight months of the year had six between them. The close leaves the index 15.30 points below where it finished August, with one session of the month and the quarter to go; the government's measure of inflation that the Fed prefers is due on Wednesday and September's payrolls on Friday.

Two honest notes. This page does not know what moved the index between 10:56 and 11:26, and it does not know why the owners of the new score fell with the old one. And the closes shown for individual companies and funds are the feed's official closing prints; the index close is the settled 7,670.84.

In the photograph it is a quarter to seven on an evening at the end of September, in a clearing in a pine wood, the sun low and gold between the trunks. The troupe has come away for a few days. The green tent is half up: its far end has already come down into the grass, and the only reason the near end is standing is that the man in the grey suit is inside the doorway, holding the pole upright in one fist, with his paper bag in the other hand. He is looking up at the top of the pole with his eyes open. He is sure it will stay up. Around him everybody else is busy with the evening — one at the stove, one in the hammock, one on the cooler under an umbrella though it is not raining, one falling over a guy rope — and nobody has noticed that he is the one holding up the holiday.