Mark Dolliver's Takes: 11%

What’s the matter with men?

One thing you can rely on in consumer-confidence data is that men will be cheerier than women. But that pattern collapsed last month in the Washington Post/ABC News Consumer Comfort In-dex, which uses a scale from +100 (great) to -100 (lousy). In the first half of 2007, women’s Comfort Index number averaged -13.8, vs. +3.72 for men. Until late May, men’s number never fell below 0, while women’s number never rose above 0.