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

The Conference Board said yesterday 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 hit 54.6 in October 1992 when the economy was emerging from 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.

On Monday, the House defeated a $700 billion bailout package aimed at sweeping bad mortgage-related debt off the books of banks, thrifts, credit unions and insurance companies to jump start lending and get the economy moving again.

Its failure sent shock waves up and down Pennsylvania Avenue and all the way to Wall Street, where investors wiped away $1.2 trillion in value from retirement funds, mutual funds and individual stock holdings. The Dow industrials dropped 778 points Monday, their largest point drop ever. However, the market rallied yesterday, with the Dow closing up 485.21 points, or 4.68 percent, to 10,850.66.

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.