After All That: Here’s How Trump’s Stock Market Ranks
One of -- and perhaps the -- defining features of the Trump era was the subjugation of reality to one man's parallel universe.
Initially, it appeared as though the former president's penchant for exaggeration, wild hyperbole, and, in many cases, outright fabrication, was just an extension of the way he operated and communicated during his decades in the private sector. As discussed here last year, Trump was always just a Ponzi-scheme practitioner, socializing his risks and neutralizing himself
The Trump library should be interesting. All the security briefings he never read and all the books written about what a failure he was.
Fun, and refreshingly new way to evaluate Trump’s presidency.
This actually spurs a question about rankings of the presidents. I’m not sure that the stock market during a presidency is a category that scholars of the US presidency consider. Would seem that it’s not useful because it can’t be compared across all presidencies. I’ll have to check the categories used in the Siena survey the next time I’m not on Twitter.
This is perhaps his best measure, and in it, Trump is still only as good Clinton and Obama. Despite being nestled in with them on the chart, he will never be considered to have had a successful presidency. This, as compared to Clinton and Obama, both of whom are considered to have been successful presidents. The billionaire businessman counting other people’s money for the rest of his llfe.
Assuming Trump can find a ghost writer who wants to work with him, we’ll have to wait until his memoir is released to see if he gets the irony.
Flash take from historians: Worst U.S. president ever.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/23/us/politics/trump-presidential-history.html
Seems like one should also consider the expansion in the National debt ( including those portions issued to both the Fed and to third parties) during each presidency.
In round numbers, national debt increased $9T during Obama’s 8 years and almost $8T in Trump’s 4 years- so there was more equity( USD printing) and leverage (UST) used by Trump to achieve his stock market return.
I would also point out that if you take out the mechanical effect of the tax cut (about 10% or ~ 2.2% annualized) he comes out slightly behind Bush#1, pretty much in the middle of the pack.
I never got this insistence on measuring Presidents economic performance especially via simple measures like jobs created or stock market returns.
Both are pretty random – maybe you can try and make a case for D, on average, outperforming R, across cycles etc. But nothing much can be said of any given 4 years – especially if one neglects the changes at the Fed Reserve level.
I think it’d be more interesting to look at policy effects where economic sciences has something to say. R economic policy can be resumed to 3 pillars : cut taxes on the rich (and we KNOW, scientifically, that is useless macro wise), cut regulations on businesses (generally favorable to businesses and business activity) and cut social safety nets (very unfavorable to the lower quartile of the pop).
D economic policies are more complex but, as Krugman recently pointed out, it’s interesting to see the evolution of the minimum wage issue. As most practical studies show that small to medium increase in minimum wage don’t have strong disemployment effects (indeed, sometimes the reverse) and is a very effective tool in fighting poverty – more and more D policymakers are onboard with rising minimum wages…
It’s not just D policymakers getting onboard with rising minimum wages…while Trump won Florida by 3% the $15 minimum wage got 61%. That’s a lot of Trump voters and people scared of “socialism”.
Fair enough and GPWM but voters aren’t likely to be guided by much economic knowledge. Generally, Trump voters are not adverse to Big Government as long as “he hurts the right people (to quote a Trump voter).
Convincing the R elites holding veto power points (whether the Senate, SCOTUS, states governorships etc) has always been the problem.
… but I hope you’re right and that increased minimum wages work out well.
FWIW, it’s not my favorite tool (even without disemployment effects at the macro level, some job losses are impossible to avoid and I’d rather add jobs than recycle workers) and I do suspect that, past a certain point , it gets counter productive. It’s easy to see if you reason ad absurdum, with a $50 minimum wage. So whether the right number is $10 or $15 and/or whether it varies depending on location, or industry… TBD.
The first two paragraphs give a summary of Trump pretty well.. Do to the constantly changing Political landscape and tenure of the Empire in question it is pretty hard to draw a lot of conclusions about the Presidency and equity performance.. The narrative changes along the usual lines when viewed in Historical terms and scrutinized for common denominators..but still rendering objective criteria very difficult..
“It’s unbelievable the twilight zone that we’re sort of living in, where people just say things and it gets repeated,”
I have no doubt that Goldman opted to report all the way back to the 19th century. But I think it’s fair to question that decision. While Henry Poor published, originally, an investor’s guide to the railroad industry, I’d argue a better starting point is the 90-stock daily index introduced by the Standard Statistics Company. in 1926. At the least it’s more similar in construction to the current product.
The protocols may be looser on the Street, but combining unlike things like that would have been frowned upon uptown, where the object of study was nothing so tawdry as money but data, methods and social research.