Check out the website for FRED Economic Database maintained by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis which you visited few weeks ago. From the main landing page, find the search box and enter “consumer confidence.” From the search results, click on the “University of Michigan: Consumer Sentiment (UMCSENT).” 

a. Use the FRED website to draw the consumer confidence data from “February 1999” to “February 2021.” Copy and paste the resulting diagram into your Word file. 

b. In the resulting diagram, you will see three recessions, including the one that we are in now. In looking at the period immediately before the recessions in 2001 and 2008 do you detect a pattern? Describe. 

c. Do you detect the same pattern you noted in part b in the period leading up to the current recession? Explain why or why not.