preliminary report earlier this month<\/a> but still at the lowest level ever on records that go back to 1952.\n <\/p>\n\n \u201cAfter the two-week ceasefire was announced and gas prices softened a touch, sentiment recovered a modest portion of its early-month losses,\u201d Joanne Hsu, director of the university\u2019s Surveys of Consumers, wrote in a statement.\n <\/p>\n
\n The Middle East conflict has roiled the global economy and left Americans grappling with sharply higher gas prices, a pickup in inflation and growing uncertainty about their finances.\n <\/p>\n
\n Current personal finances worsened by 9% in April, and about half of consumers surveyed spontaneously mentioned that high prices were eroding their standards of living, Hsu noted.\n <\/p>\n
\n Consumers\u2019 year-ahead inflation expectations shot higher this month, rising to 4.7% from 3.8% in March. It was the largest one-month jump since April 2025, a month when President Donald Trump announced a sweeping set of steep tariffs on many nations.\n <\/p>\n
\n The war and its economic fallout comes at a time when Americans were already navigating high costs of living from a post-pandemic inflation spike and years of prices climbing much faster than has been typical.\n <\/p>\n
\n Sentiment is hovering just below levels seen in June 2022, when inflation hit a four-decade high.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Americans still feel lousy about the economy and worry that the US-Israeli war with Iran will continue to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":549315,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[84,1294,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-549314","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-business","tag-economy","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/549314","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=549314"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/549314\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/549315"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=549314"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=549314"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=549314"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}