This story was originally published on nationaljournal.com on March 3, 2017 New York Fed Pres­id­ent Wil­li­am Dud­ley told CNN on Tues­day that “there’s no ques­tion that an­im­al spir­its have been un­leashed a bit post the elec­tion,” a ref­er­ence to a term that eco­nom­ist John Maynard Keynes coined to de­scribe people ex­hib­it­ing op­tim­ism—of­ten about the mar­kets—that is not ne­ces­sar­ily groun­ded in facts. Dud­ley’s use of the term is re­min­is­cent of then-Fed­er­al Re­serve Chair­man Alan Green­span us­ing “ir­ra­tion­al ex­uber­ance” two dec­ades ago to de­scribe stock-mar­ket be­ha­vi­or at the time, now re­membered as the tech bubble. The stock mar­ket has been on fire since Don­ald Trump’s elec­tion. Pres­id­ent Trump’s well-re­ceived ad­dress to Con­gress on Tues­day night sent the Dow soar­ing above 21,000 for the first time, and pushed the S&P 500 in­dex to a re­cord level, over 2,300 and with­in sight of 2,500. The Con­fer­ence Board’s Con­sumer Con­fid­ence In­dex is at a 15-year high while the Uni­versity of Michigan’s Con­sumer Sen­ti­ment In­dex is just barely be­low the dec­ade peak hit in Janu­ary. The latest Na­tion­al Fed­er­a­tion of In­de­pend­ent Busi­ness sur­vey, which came out

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