Business confidence can’t accurately predict US growth.

2. Literature Review As stated by Nowzohour and Stracca (2017), “Sentiment may be used to describe economic agents’ views of future economic developments that may influence the economy because they influence agents’ decisions today”. The economic sentiment includes two opposing dimensions—confidence and uncertainty (van der Wielen and Barrios 2020). The COVID-19 pandemic and social and economic constraints induced by this pandemic have undoubtedly brought more tension to the economy (Baker et al. 2020), while at the same time affecting the confidence of households and businesses. As economic-sentiment indicators are one of the most critical indicators showing the economy’s overall health, it is crucial to assess how the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic affects those indicators. Our analysis contributes to the theoretical issues analyzing how consumer and business sentiments can change in periods of external shocks. Consumer confidence is often described as a fundamental driving force of the economy, because when consumers are optimistic, consumption increases, and we have economic growth; while in pessimistic periods, consumers pull down the economy. Sentiment issues are significant in analyzing economic growth and tendencies in financial markets, and especially when trying to identify future trends. The sentiment of financial markets, consumers, and business entities can be measured by various surveys, after which different sentiment indices are created based on the responses to specific questions about current and expected economic conditions. These indices are used for forecasting household expenditures, consumer spending habits, tendencies in the labor market, or even industrial production growth. However, some authors have an opinion that sentiment surveys have little power for predictions (Roberts and Simon 2001).