Markets Aren’t the Measure
We don’t yet know how history will judge Donald Trump’s presidency, but we know how he wanted his term in office to be evaluated — by the performance of the stock market. From the earliest days after his election, he keenly tweeted the market’s strong reaction to his victory, and he continued to hype the succession of records on his watch.
This was always somewhat of a dumb idea. But as this is what he wanted, here is how the Trump presidency compared with the first terms of his three predecessors, Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. In all cases, the performance of the S&P 500 has been normalized to start at 100 on their inauguration days:
Trump’s term in the end lagged behind both Obama and Clinton. Before the pandemic implosion 11 months ago, he was at least keeping pace with Clinton, and the rebound since last March has been extraordinary. And of course the Trump market has fared far better than the George W. Bush version.
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