Korean consumer sentiment fell for the first time since April, and the sharper drop is in what households think of conditions right now

104.5.

That is the Bank of Korea's composite consumer sentiment index for August, down 2.3 points from July and the first monthly fall since April, Kim Boram reported for Yonhap News Agency. A reading above 100 means optimists outnumber pessimists. The gauge has been above 100 since May and still is.

So the headline number is a small step back inside good territory.

The parts moved further than the whole

Households' assessment of current economic conditions fell five points, to 79. Their view of the months ahead fell three, to 89. Both sit well below the 100 line, and both fell harder than the composite did, which is what happens when the components that are already weak are the ones doing the moving.

The central bank's explanation, as quoted by Yonhap, is that real activity held up and two other things did not: "the stock market correction and mounting inflation weighed heavily on consumer sentiment".

On prices it added a distinction worth keeping. Consumer prices rose 2.8 percent in July, slower than the 3.2 percent recorded in June, and the bank noted that many people believe prices are still high.

That is the whole of it. A slowing rate of increase is not a fall in the level, and a household survey asks about the level.

The document

The Bank of Korea publishes this survey monthly and puts out an English edition under the title Consumer Tendency Survey.

The August edition could not be opened from here. The bank's press release index, in English and in Korean, is a client-side application that returns an empty shell to a plain request and a placeholder page in a browser, and while individual release pages are server-rendered and answer normally, there is no way from outside to discover the identifier for a release you have not already found. The newest English edition reachable by direct address is the one for June.

The figures above therefore rest on Yonhap's reporting of a release this desk could not read, and are set down that way rather than dressed as primary sourcing.