European consumer confidence has spent forty years mostly underwater, a long blue trench of negative readings interrupted only by two brief, almost accidental spikes. One arrived near the dot-com bust—because nothing lifts spirits like watching markets melt. The other flickered around 2018 for reasons still unexplained by the 2,300 surveyed citizens. Everywhere else the bars dive: early nineties, sovereign-debt years, pandemic, inflation surge. Higher numbers are supposed to signal optimism and buoy the euro. The chart suggests the opposite has been the default setting.
