After some early morning tweets, things were pretty quiet on the Twitter front with you yesterday, Donald. But you did post something about "hope":
► 'Economists say Trump delivered hope' ¹
Leaving aside quoting the headline that again refers to yourself in the third person, this tweet includes a link to a Politico article² discussing the Conference Board Consumer Confidence Index bump which you also tweeted about yesterday.³
A careful read beyond the headlines (I know, Donald, I know) indicates the story is a bit more mixed than that.
1. As I noted yesterday (and as the article reiterates), most presidents-elect get a bump in the CCI post-election.
2. Also as I noted yesterday, While your bump brought the overall number to the highest level in 15 years, it's the end of long chain up upward movement since shortly after … well, Obama took office and started wrangling the Great Recession back under control. In other words, it's a trend, not just some personal achievement.
3. I saw some breakdown of numbers yesterday (apologies, no citation, so feel free to disregard) that showed that while older age cohorts consumer confidence was way up, younger cohorts (18-25) was seriously down. Any thoughts on that?
4. The issue is not how consumers feel about the future (which is what the index measures), but how you actually go about delivering that. As the economists in the actual article note:
“There’s a lot of hope that things are going to change and get better,” said Mark Vitner, a senior economist at Wells Fargo. “Let’s see what happens.”
“Optimism did surge after the election. The question is can we maintain it,” said Lynn Franco, the Conference Board’s director of economic indicators. “That depends on what happens in terms of the economy and job growth.”
“Trump will be breaking with tradition if we don’t see a recession in the next four years,” PIMCO’s Joachim Fels wrote in a recent blog post.
In other words, the CCI is like the big surge of excitement around opening day at one of your resorts or hotels. The question becomes, can you actually sustain that excitement by consistently delivering on what people are looking for. Or will this be another one of your projects that goes bust because you're over-leveraged and your business plans didn't make any sense?
Or, In still other words (so many words!), taking a victory lap at this point about the economy (and in the third person) doesn't seem all that warranted. It actually comes off as kind of a flim-flam.
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¹ https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/814231064847728640
² https://t.co/SjGBgglIuQ
³ https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/813945096269860866
Economists say Trump delivered hope
Now he needs to boost wages and create jobs to keep the economy on track
