WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) – Will President Donald Trump usher in an economic boom?

In case you haven’t noticed, while liberals fret about who Trump is talking to on the phone and conservatives fret about trade wars and deficits, the stock market is going crazy.

Irrational exuberance or eager anticipation of a rebounding U.S. economy unshackled from over-burdensome regulations, high corporate taxes and too-timid fiscal policy?

Paul McCulley, former chief economist for Pimco, says it’s the latter.

“The market is essentially celebrating the end of fiscal austerity,” McCulley said last week on CNBC. “And it just happens to be a vehicle of Mr. Trump. But the end of fiscal austerity is the key economic issue.”

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McCulley, who said he voted for Hillary Clinton, added that his biggest complaint about his favored candidate was that her pledge to “not add a penny to the national debt” was tantamount to a “straitjacket of fiscal austerity forever.”

This economist thinks Trump’s economic plan, including spending a trillion dollars on infrastructure, is the “right Keynesian policy.”

“I’ve never had an issue with increasing the size of the budget deficit,” said McCulley, who is now a senior fellow at Cornell Law School. “I think it’s been too small. I have zero problem with increased public investment and funding it with deficits.”

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There are some who want to give the credit for this new bullishness to eight years of savvy economic policy under President Barack Obama.

Those economic experts at Politico, for instance, hailed last week’s jobs report, which showed the headline unemployment falling to 4.6% from 4.9%. The publication quoted a self-serving remark from Obama’s chief economic adviser, Jason Furman, about how “exciting” it was to see a number that low.

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Surely, however, if the economic picture was that rosy and the argument for Obama’s policies that compelling, Clinton would have run on that record instead of relentlessly attacking Trump’s temperament and character.

Trump economic adviser Peter Navarro quickly explained why that low unemployment figure is not convincing by pointing to another low number in the report.

“The November jobs report showing a decline in the labor-force participation rate further demonstrates an urgent need for President-elect Trump’s America First economic plan,” Navarro said in a statement. “We have not seen levels this low since 1978.”

And, in fact, the labor participation rate – the number in the labor force as a percentage of the population — did fall to 62.7% in November from 62.8% the previous month, the second monthly decline. This compares to the 66% level in 2008, before the onset of the financial crisis. If the labor participation rate now was at that level, the unemployment rate would be nearly 10%.

Meanwhile the absolute number of working-age civilians not in the labor force rose to 95 million, compared with 79 million in 2008. (”Working-age” refers to anyone over 16, so the number includes students, retirees, and others who can’t or don’t want to work, as well as those who might want to work if jobs were available.)

All this explains why no one feels we are anywhere near “full employment,” as Politico would have it, whatever the statistics seem to say.

As for the third-quarter annualized gross domestic product growth rate of 3.2%, that figure must be put in the context of anemic growth of just over 1% in the first half. In its October economic outlook — before Trump’s unexpected victory — the International Monetary Fund scaled back its forecast for U.S. growth for the full year to 1.6% from the 2.2% predicted in July.

While establishment economists are painting lurid pictures of how Trump’s policies will result in disaster, other experts are seeing the hopeful beginnings of a robust economic expansion.

Bard College’s Walter Russell Mead, while acknowledging there are many ways a Trump administration could fail, nonetheless speculates on a “path to Mt. Rushmore” for the incoming president if he pushes the potential of the shale revolution in the country’s economic resurgence.

Not only will the shale boom create jobs in oil and gas production and construction of infrastructure, the cheap sources of energy will make the U.S. more competitive than ever as a manufacturing site, Mead argues.

“An energy boom offers the best prospect for growth in manufacturing jobs,” he wrote last week. “The energy-rich United States is becoming significantly more attractive as a manufacturing site for large, energy (and job) intensive plants.”

In an even-more visionary vein, Mead also sees possibilities for Trump to promote a third wave of suburbanization, offering the burgeoning millennial generation an affordable lifestyle as many of the trendy urban centers become prohibitively expensive.

“By promoting a new exodus to a new generation of exurbs, the Trump administration can expand its support among millennials and jump start a new era of rapid growth,” Mead says with some optimism.

In separate research, Chapman College’s Joel Kotkin has found a model for this surburban expansion and rapid economic growth in the Texas Triangle of Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston and Austin-San Antonio, spurred by the low-tax and low-regulation environment Trump is expected to promote.

“These cities are offering residents a broad array of choices — from high-density communities to those where the population is spread out — and a wealth of opportunities,” Kotkin says in introducing a new report from the Center for Opportunity Urbanism on the Texas example.

Another Trump economic adviser, Stephen Moore, drove home the point this week by claiming there is a “blue-state depression” — not just a funk over Clinton’s loss but a real economic depression.

The 10 blue states where Clinton won with the biggest margins have all shown declines in population from domestic migration (excluding immigration) and as such are “the loser states.”

“They are all progressive,” Moore wrote in a Washington Times op-ed. “High taxes (sic) rates. High welfare benefits. Heavy regulation. Environmental extremism. Super minimum wages. Most outlaw energy drilling. The whole left-wing playbook is on display in the Hillary states. And people are leaving in droves.”

The 10 states where Trump had the biggest margin of victory were all net gainers, Moore said. Florida and Texas, the two biggest conservative states by population, gained nearly 1 million new residents each, while California and New York, the biggest liberal states, saw similar numbers leave.

The partisan debate on economic policy will no doubt continue. Meanwhile, stock-market investors are telling us they expect a boom under Trump.