President-elect Donald Trump touted resilient holiday spending and a strong stock market in a self-congratulatory tweet on Monday evening.
"The world was gloomy before I won - there was no hope. Now the market is up nearly 10% and Christmas spending is over a trillion dollars!" the president-elect tweeted on Boxing Day.
A Deloitte University Press report in September projected that holiday sales this year will exceed $1 trillion, reflecting a 3.6 percent to 4.0 percent increase, though final holiday sales data is pending. The trillion dollar figure cited by Trump was not sourced in the tweet but a spokesperson replied by email that the source of the claim was the same forecast by Deloitte.
Other forecasts reflect similar findings. The National Retail Federation (NRF) in October projected a 3.6 percent increase in sales, excluding autos, gas and restaurant spending, in November and December, although its forecast of $655.8 billion is shy of the $1 trillion mark. The NRF credited "steady job and income gains" made before Trump's election win for the uptick in consumer confidence this holiday season.
Meanwhile, total post-election gains for the Dow Jones Industrial Average, S&P 500 and Nasdaq are 8.7 percent, 5.8 percent and 5.2 percent respectively.
Even as the U.S. indices have notched record close after record close, some investors are cautious that markets could have run ahead of themselves. More than half of the respondents to the CNBC Fed Survey for December thought that market expectations of Trump's proposed policies were too optimistic.
Among the president-elect's other Boxing Day targets were President Obama and the United Nations. President-elect Trump had tweeted earlier in the day that there was "NO WAY" that Obama could have won against him while the UN was criticized for being "just a club for people to get together, talk and have a good time."