If tax reform and other legislation in Washington suffer the same fate as the bid to roll back Mr. Obama’s health care overhaul
did last week, Ms. Zentner said, the Trump bump “could be built like a house of cards that comes crumbling down.”
Part of the problem is that despite Mr. Trump’s Oval Office sessions with chief executives
and the return of what the economist John Maynard Keynes termed “animal spirits,” corporate America is not investing heavily, at least so far, in new plants and equipment.
“There has been an incredible rise in sentiment, but the proof is in the pudding later.”
Ms. Zentner expects growth of 1 percent this quarter, and considers recent data “solid,” but added
that the big gap between expectations and reality “creates discomfort for economists and monetary policy makers.”
“The divergence is stunning,” she added, drawing a distinction between “soft data” like consumer confidence and “hard data” like retail sales.
“While many of our customers have seen a Trump bump in terms of their stock price, the industry hasn’t seen an effect on retail traffic.”
One additional factor holding back economic growth nationally —
and in Burke County, N. C., where Valdese is based — is the proportion of Americans now in the labor force.
“To get it to translate to hard data, you’d need new policies like tax cuts, tax reform, and a major increase in infrastructure spending.”
A version of this article appears in print on March 30, 2017, on Page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Looking for a ‘Trump Bump’.
The government’s estimate of gross domestic product is based on specific data points for economic factors like monthly retail sales, inventories, trade
and other hard data, which also count more heavily in the Atlanta Fed’s model.
