U.S. consumer confidence plunged in February in its biggest monthly decline in more than four years, a business research group said Tuesday.

The Conference Board said its consumer confidence index dropped from 105.3 in January to 98.3 this month, the largest month-to-month decline since August 2021.

With U.S. consumer spending accounting for about 70% of the world’s largest economy, the three major stock indexes on Wall Street all fell on news of the report. The tech-heavy NASDAQ dropped by more than a percentage point.

The Conference Board said in a statement, "Views of current labor market conditions weakened. Consumers became pessimistic about future business conditions and less optimistic about future income. Pessimism about future employment prospects worsened and reached a 10-month high."

Separately, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent contended Tuesday that the U.S. economy is more fragile under the surface than economic indicators suggest, and he vowed to "reprivatize" growth by cutting government spending and regulation.

In his first major economic policy address, Bessent told a group at the Australian Embassy in Washington that interest rate volatility, enduring inflation and reliance on the public sector for job growth have hobbled the American economy, despite general national economic growth and low unemployment.

Bessent blamed "prolific overspending" under former President Joe Biden and regulations that have hindered supply-side growth as the main drivers of "sticky inflation."

"The previous administration's over-reliance on excessive government spending and overbearing regulation left us with an economy that may have exhibited some reasonable metrics but ultimately was brittle underneath," he said.

Bessent said that 95% of all job growth in the past 12 months has been concentrated in public and government-adjacent sectors, such as health care and education, jobs offering slower wage growth and less productivity than private-sector jobs.Meanwhile, he said jobs in manufacturing, metals, mining and information technology all contracted or flatlined over the same period.

"The private sector has been in recession," Bessent said. "Our goal is to reprivatize the economy."

Consumers had appeared increasingly confident heading toward the end of 2024 and spent generously during the holiday season. But U.S. retail sales dropped sharply in January, with unusually cold weather throughout much of the U.S. taking some of the blame.

Retail sales fell 0.9% last month from December, the Commerce Department reported last week. The decline, the biggest in a year, came after two months of robust gains.

With inflation remaining a concern for consumers and uncertainty about President Donald Trump’s plan to impose new or stiffer tariffs on imports from other countries, policymakers at the country’s central bank, the Federal Reserve, have taken a cautious approach on whether to further cut its benchmark interest rate.

The Fed left its key borrowing rate alone at its last meeting after cutting it at the previous three.

"Consumers' confidence has deteriorated sharply in the face of threats to impose large tariffs and to slash federal spending and employment," Pantheon Macroeconomics chief Samuel Tombs wrote in a note to clients.

Some information in this report came from The Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse.

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