Americans' pessimism about the nation's economy has skyrocketed in the past few months, with a majority of the public expect the already fragile economy to get even worse, a new CNN poll showed Monday.
Sixty percent of those polled said that the economy is still in a downturn and getting worse, up 24 percentage points from April, when a plurality believed that things had stabilized, according to the CNN/ORC International survey.
"Since the question was first asked in the spring of 2009, the number of Americans who said the economy was in a downturn had never been higher than 40 percent," CNN Polling Director Keating Holland said. "The jump in economic pessimism is across the board - - a majority of every major demographic and political subgroup thinks the economy is in a downturn and getting worse."
The survey, conducted on August 5-7, seemed to reflect a host of recent economic news that weighed on the public confidence -- the still-above-9-percent national jobless rate; the downgrade of U.S. credit rating by Standard & Poor's; the sharp decline of stock prices.
The survey showed that three-quarters of those polled said things are going badly in the country today, a 15-point increase since May. Just 24 percent say things are going well, the lowest figure since April of 2009.
