If tax reform and other legislation in Washington suffer the same fate as the bid to roll back Mr. Obama’s health care overhaul<br />did last week, Ms. Zentner said, the Trump bump “could be built like a house of cards that comes crumbling down.”<br />Part of the problem is that despite Mr. Trump’s Oval Office sessions with chief executives<br />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.<br />“There has been an incredible rise in sentiment, but the proof is in the pudding later.”<br />Ms. Zentner expects growth of 1 percent this quarter, and considers recent data “solid,” but added<br />that the big gap between expectations and reality “creates discomfort for economists and monetary policy makers.”<br />“The divergence is stunning,” she added, drawing a distinction between “soft data” like consumer confidence and “hard data” like retail sales.<br />“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.”<br />One additional factor holding back economic growth nationally —<br />and in Burke County, N. C., where Valdese is based — is the proportion of Americans now in the labor force.<br />“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.”<br />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’.<br />The government’s estimate of gross domestic product is based on specific data points for economic factors like monthly retail sales, inventories, trade<br />and other hard data, which also count more heavily in the Atlanta Fed’s model.
