It was a boast that every political leader would be thrilled to make in a single tweet, especially when, like Donald Trump, they are in a hole and looking for a spade to dig themselves out. Trump tweeted: “Highest Stock Market EVER, best economic numbers in years, unemployment lowest in 17 years, wages raising, border secure, S.C.: No WH chaos!”, encouraging the world to put aside the unfolding Russia scandal, impotence over North Korean missile launches and the sacking of newly arrived press secretary Anthony “the Mooch” Scaramucci, and look instead at the economic boom apparently unfolding under the president’s administration.

Highest Stock Market EVER, best economic numbers in years, unemployment lowest in 17 years, wages raising, border secure, S.C.: No WH chaos! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 31, 2017

A little while later he followed up his summary of economic news by tweeting a quote from Fox News morning anchor Stuart Varney that said: “Corporations have NEVER made as much money as they are making now”.

"Corporations have NEVER made as much money as they are making now." Thank you Stuart Varney @foxandfriends Jobs are starting to roar,watch! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 1, 2017

As a final riposte to critics, he added: “Stock Market could hit all-time high (again) 22,000 today. Was 18,000 only 6 months ago on Election Day. Mainstream media seldom mentions!”

Stock Market could hit all-time high (again) 22,000 today. Was 18,000 only 6 months ago on Election Day. Mainstream media seldom mentions! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 1, 2017

His message is clear. Whatever is going on in the White House, the folks on Main Street and Wall Street are back in business and making money, which raises the question: is the US economy really booming and how much credit can Trump take for it?

‘Highest stock market EVER…’

The Dow Jones Industrial Average powered through 22000 last week to hit another record high. The broader measure of US companies, the S&P 500, continued its ascent back to a high point established in June.

Wall Street analysts expect the US stock market, which has soared by more than a fifth since Trump took office, to maintain its supercharged rise for some time yet.

But not much of the boost can be credited to the president. There was an initial spike following his election as infrastructure companies boomed on hopes of big government spending contracts, and wealthy investors and corporations gambled that he would hand out eye-watering tax cuts.

But more important has been the action of the Federal Reserve, the US central bank. This year, despite two small rate rises, the signs are that a return to anything like normal interest rates is a long way off. Falling inflation means that the pressure is off for the Fed to act and a slower pace of increases is now likely.

Stocks are not the only assets affected. Foreign exchange traders watch the same signals and since January have decided that rate rises, which act to suck foreign money into the US, are not going to happen. They sold the dollar, which has fallen by around 10% against a basket of currencies since January.

One major spin-off of that decline has been a boost to exports, especially to China, despite Trump’s anti-Beijing rhetoric. That’s good news for companies from Apple to General Electric.

Another trend is the spectacular revenues of most large companies. Firms have continued to spend their improving profit levels on share buybacks. This policy means companies spend their own cash to reduce the number of shares in circulation, pushing up their value on the stock market.

Verdict Yes, the stock market is up – but mostly in response to signals of a slower withdrawal of cheap credit by the Federal Reserve.

‘Best economic numbers…’

Trump is excited about the economy and his tweets are mostly in response to the improvement in GDP growth seen during the second quarter, to an annualised rate of 2.6%.

Surveys of the manufacturing and services sector for July and the latest monthly labour market data illustrate the buoyant state of the economy, with all three expanding.

But most indicators show consumer spending is losing its power and that eight years of vigorous expansion is drawing to its conclusion.

Figures from the Federal Housing Finance Agency show that annual house price rises have almost halved from 6% last year to 3.2% in the first half of 2017.

Retail sales have followed the same path. Strong growth in 2016 has petered out this year, with May and June recording significant declines amid falling demand for trucks, cars and discretionary items.

Robert J Shapiro, a former economic adviser to Bill Clinton, says: “This expansion is getting old. The growth rate is half what we saw in the 1990s and there are strong indications that the economy will weaken next year.”

Shapiro, who runs his own economic consultancy, Sonecon, in Washington, believes few people will permit Trump to take credit for the current benign economic situation – but will hold him responsible should it deteriorate by the midterm elections in November 2018.

“We always give credit for the economy in the first year to the previous president,” he says. “Trump hasn’t passed any significant legislation, and while he has put forward some de-regulation measures, they haven’t had any effect yet.”

Trump’s Treasury secretary, Steve Mnuchin, argues that his budget proposals for the autumn will extend the current run of strong growth and push it to beyond 3% year after year through to the middle of the next decade, at which point bumper tax receipts will bring the government spending deficit back into balance.

The budget is a mix of tax cuts for the richest and middle-income groups coupled with deep cuts in further education and welfare spending.

Albert Edwards, the famously gloomy global strategist at Société Générale, is convinced that the loose monetary policies preferred by the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England, and endorsed by Trump, are encouraging a debt bubble that will burst with similar consequences to the 2008 financial crash.

Edwards said in a recent note to investors: “I’m genuinely getting tired of bashing the major central banks, but every day more evidence mounts that almost exactly the same debt excesses that caused the global financial crisis in 2008 are present today.

“The Bank of England and Federal Reserve deserve particular vilification for failing to remove the monetary punchbowl quickly enough – just like the 2003-2007 period, allowing grotesque debt excesses to build.”

Mnuchin’s budget is expected to be watered down as it makes its way through Congress and emerge as not much more than a mild tax cut for the wealthy. That would leave the Fed unmoved and sticking to its course of only incremental interest rate rises over a period of years.

Verdict The best years of the current recovery are in the past, though unfunded tax cuts in the autumn could provide a sugar rush that pushes up growth and inflation next year.

Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin forecasts 3% annual growth for years to come. Photograph: Susan Walsh/AP

‘Unemployment lowest…’

Economists have worried that the US economy is struggling to create significant employment despite Trump’s promise of “JOBS! JOBS! JOBS!”

July marked the 82nd consecutive month of jobs growth in the US, but, just as in the UK, the recovery from the depths of the 2008 recession has been marked by slow wage growth and a worryingly large number of people in part-time work. Huge numbers of women and older workers have quit the jobs market completely. America now has one of the lowest labour market participation rates in the developed world.

Jobs data has emphasised the trend, with the largest growth in low-paying service industry jobs, and not in the higher-paying traditional blue-collar industries Trump pledged to support.

Coal exports have boomed this year, but jobs in food services are growing at more than three times the rate of mining jobs, and manufacturing employment growth is static.

Shapiro says he advised Hillary Clinton before last November’s presidential election that she would need to put in place policies that raised the skill levels of blue-collar workers to prepare them for workplaces increasingly dominated by technology.

“You have already hit full employment so you can’t expect strong job expansion to support growth,” he says. “And without strong jobs growth you need to increase productivity, but that has been slow for three years and shows no sign of increasing.

“This is a White House that has largely been absorbed by the Russia scandal and the legal implications for senior members of the administration. It is not a White House with many eyes on the economy. For one thing there haven’t been any economists appointed yet. In the Treasury it’s just Secretary Mnuchin and that’s it.”

Verdict Well-paid blue-collar jobs remain hard to find, despite rising employment.

‘Wages rising…’

For much of the last decade, economists have expected a return to wage rises of 4% that dramatically lift consumer spending and feed into rising prices. It’s the trigger the Fed is looking for to raise interest rates more than the one percentage point it has managed in the last 20 months.

Wages once again grew only marginally in June, rising 2.5% from a year ago and little changed from prior months. Adjusted for inflation, “real” wage growth is close to 1%.

Adam Posen, the president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, says the labour market is looking mildly confusing at the moment after years of rising employment and low wages growth.

“The workforce is only growing at 0.5% and productivity’s at 1%. Even if productivity is raised to 1.5% you still don’t get near Mnuchin’s 3-4% wages growth targets,” says Posen, who has worked in central banks on both sides of the Atlantic – at the New York Fed and on the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee.

He and Shapiro agree that there is little in Trump’s programme that will increase productivity.

Greg Daco, chief US economist at Oxford Economics, says employers have coped with an ageing population by employing migrants, leaving much of Trump’s agenda as “anti-growth”.

He says: “The economy is doing OK, but not great. And the high hopes business had for Trump’s initiatives have turned negative because, if anything, the president’s time in office is characterised by protectionism, anti-immigration and lingering policy uncertainty.”

Daco has pencilled in growth averaging just 1.5% over the next 10 years.

Verdict Wage rises are showing no signs of picking up. The only silver lining is that paralysis on Capitol Hill will mean that inflation stays low and real wages stay positive.

Jobseekers queue to apply for one of the 2,500 jobs being offered at an Amazon distribution centre last week in Romeoville, Illinois. Photograph: Scott Olson/Getty Images

‘NEVER made as much money…’

Kathleen Brooks, research director at spread-betting firm City Index, says that with 350 out of the 500 companies on the S&P 500 having reported earnings for the second quarter, it is clear that “virtually every sector exceeded expectations for earnings and sales”.

Domestic sales on average have remained solid as consumers shrug off the uncertainty created by legislative chaos in Washington.

The biggest boost has comes from exports, which rose modestly last month to $192bn – the highest since April 2015 – on rising shipments of cars and consumer goods, including mobile phones. Imports fell slightly.

Importantly, the deficit in the trade of goods with China fell by 6.2% to a seasonally adjusted $30.1bn.

Trump is credited with a boom in coal exports and a commitment from companies like Apple to bring back factories to the US when they invest in their next generation of phones. Apple’s profits, along with those of most tech firms, were among the highlights of the recent reporting season.

But the main reason for these numbers are improving global trade links, after a recovery from lows seen in 2015. While Trump may appear to be a huge political risk to smooth trade flows, the situation at the moment is calm and supporting improved global growth.

Trump could have his moment to boast as a result of his upcoming budget, which promises a huge cut in corporation tax from 35% – one of the highest headline rates in the G20. Scepticism that a cut can be agreed in Congress is rife, not least because Barack Obama was unable to push through similar reductions.

Nevertheless, just the prospect of budget handouts has lifted the spirits of average Americans. Unlike in the UK, where consumer confidence has fallen back to levels seen in the immediate aftermath of the Brexit vote, Americans last week started feeling much more confident about the economy, pushing the Bloomberg consumer comfort index to a seven-week high.

The rising stock market, rather than anything Trump said or did, was credited with the confidence boost, especially among those earning more than $75,000.

Daco says he is concerned that after several years when consumers spent within their means, the income and spending trends started diverging last year. He blames a greater reliance on credit, especially to buy cars, and a “savings dip” that has seen consumers run down deposits to fund spending.

The latest data shows the personal savings rate at 3.8% – much lower than the pre-revision level of around 5% and down about 2 percentage points since the start of 2016.

Trump was having none of it on Friday, retweeting his fans. One said: “Republican Senators who are opposing the President, look at the great economic news: Americans Are Noticing!”

Verdict One of the few certainties is that corporations and wealthy company bosses will prosper under a Trump presidency.