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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsConfidence Boomed After the Election. The Economy Hasn't.
After Donald J. Trump won the presidential election, Americans optimism about the economic future soared. But midway through the year, that optimism has not translated into concrete economic gains.
This seeming contradiction exposes a reality about the role of psychology in economics or more specifically, how psychology is connected only loosely to actual growth. It will take more than feelings to fix the sluggishness that has been evident in the United States and other major economies for years. Confidence isnt some magic elixir for the economy: Businesses will hire and invest only when they see concrete evidence of demand for their products, and consumers intensify their spending only when their incomes justify it.
The sharp rise in economic optimism after the election came through no matter how the question was asked or who answered, whether the survey was intended to capture consumer confidence or consumer comfort or consumer sentiment. It was true in surveys of small-business owners and of C.E.O.s of some of the biggest companies in the world. And the rise during the winter months in these surveys has mostly been sustained in the months since.
But the economy is plodding along at the same modest rate it has for the last eight years nonetheless at least when you look at hard data around economic activity instead of soft data like surveys, as analysts put it.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/04/upshot/confidence-boomed-after-the-election-the-economy-hasnt.html
exboyfil
(17,865 posts)to claim macro economic successes a short time after the election. His supporters did the same. They took ownership of the economy with those statements. I tried to explain to them that the trajectory for the first year will have been set by the policy decisions that preceded the Trump administration.
I am waiting for them to blame Obama for the coming recession.
DetlefK
(16,423 posts)Somehow that talking-point didn't stick...
Orsino
(37,428 posts)Claiming success without evidence is all he has ever done. He'll seize on any fable anyone hands him, and crow about his accomplishments...because that is what has always worked for him.
Iliyah
(25,111 posts)Ok, I'm from the Los Angeles area and here there was and still is doom and gloom about the economy and almost everything else. As I can read, the good ole USA is in a parallel universe.
flamingdem
(39,333 posts)So it's still strong strangely