The poll was taken as the $85 billion government spending cuts known as sequestration are starting to bite. After growing at a 2.5 percent rate in the first three months of 2013, the economy will slow to a 1.6 percent pace in the current quarter, according to forecasts by economists surveyed by Bloomberg.

Negative Impact

Global investors have noticed. By a 49 percent to 40 percent margin, they say the sequestration has had a negative effect upon the U.S. investment climate.

With President Barack Obama’s administration mired in controversies over the Internal Revenue Service, the Justice Department seizure of Associated Press reporters’ telephone records, and the Benghazi, Libya, terrorist attack, the economic brightening provides the president some good news.

Obama’s 58 percent favorability rating is its highest in the Bloomberg customer poll since January 2010, though among U.S. respondents the president draws only 35 percent. Thirty- seven percent of global respondents have an unfavorable view. Fifty-two percent say they are optimistic about Obama’s policies, compared with 42 percent who say they’re pessimistic.

“President Obama has benefited from tough decisions taken early in his first term with regard to the stability of the U.S. financial sector,” said Nessan O’Carroll, 40, co-head of emerging markets derivatives risks solutions for Mizuho Corporate Bank in London. “This has allowed the U.S. to get back on the growth-trajectory path much more quickly.”

Favoring Bernanke

Investors also applaud Ben S. Bernanke, the Federal Reserve Board chairman, who has driven the total assets on the central bank’s balance sheet to more than $3.3 trillion in a bid to boost economic growth. By a 76 percent to 20 percent margin, those surveyed give Bernanke a favorable rating -- and unlike the president, there is little difference between the views of investors in the U.S. and elsewhere.

“The sustainability of the U.S. recovery is contingent on the continuing easy-money policy at the Fed coupled with a softer line on spending cuts out of Washington,” says Patrick Smith, 47, chief investment officer of Granite Springs Asset Management in Summit, New Jersey.

With inflation readings virtually flat -- the core consumer price index is up just 1.7 percent over the past year and the Fed’s preferred inflation gauge up just 1.1 percent -- the central bank is unlikely to end its monetary stimulus anytime soon.