EAST LANSING – After two years of economic woes, Michigan citizens appear to be seeing new glimmers of hope in Michigan State University’s latest State of the State Survey.

“The situation is still grim, but there are hopeful signs,” said MSU Economist Charles Ballard, who directs the quarterly telephone survey.

A total of 991 interviews were randomly conducted between November 2009 and January 2010.

“A year ago, the economy was in free fall in a recession that is by far the worst since the Great Depression,” said Ballard. “But the economy has stabilized since last summer. The economy certainly isn?t doing great now, but it seems to have found the bottom.”

The latest quarter’s results are slightly more positive than they have been, Ballard said.

In the most recent survey, 54 percent of Michigan citizens responding said their financial situation is worse than it was a year ago.

“That doesn’t sound very good, but it is actually the best reading since the fall of 2000,” Ballard said.

Some 46 percent described their current situation as either excellent or good in the latest survey, well below the State of the State?s record high of 65 percent in 2002.

It represents, however, the best consumer assessment of the present since Fall 2007, Ballard said.

In the first State of the State of 2009, some 71 percent of Michigan residents rated President Barack Obama?s performance as excellent or good, Ballard said.

However, Obama’s rating has fallen fairly steadily among respondents to the survey throughout the year. In the final survey of 2009, only 44 percent of those responding to the survey gave Obama an excellent or good grade.

The drop in approval was highest among respondents describing themselves as independents as the overall results suggested that a Democratic Party surge in early 2009 is on the wane, Ballard said.

Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm’s approval took a slight dip as well. About 27 percent of the survey?s respondents gave her an excellent or good grade for governing.

The Fall 2009 survey, with a margin of error of 3.1 percent, was conducted by the Office for Survey Research, a unit of the Institute for Public Policy and Survey Research in MSU’s College of Social Sciences.

SOSS is Michigan’s only survey systematically designed to monitor the public’s mood on important issues in major regions of the state.

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