NEW YORK - With the holiday shopping season about to start, consumer confidence is hovering near the lowest it has been since President Bush's father was commander in chief. It may dip more as Americans open their 401(k) statements and see how much they've lost in the last few weeks.

The Conference Board said Tuesday that its Consumer Confidence Index is now at 59.8. That's up slightly from a revised 58.5 in August and higher than analysts expected. But it's still about half what it was a year ago and near the lowest since the index registered 54.6 in October 1992 when the economy was coming out of a recession.

Now George H.W. Bush's son is wrestling with his own economic crisis. Home prices are plummeting, foreclosures are rising, jobs are dwindling, fuel and food costs are soaring, and Wall Street is writhing in the grips of its worst financial emergency since the Great Depression.

"We are already at battered [confidence] levels, and I would not be surprised if it gets lower from here," said Adam York, an economic analyst at Wachovia Securities. The Conference Board survey, based on a sample of 5,000 U.S. households, aims at measuring how much faith people have in the job market and in the economy now and over the next six months. The cutoff date for responses to the survey was Sept. 23 and doesn't capture Monday's stock market plunge.

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