October 1, 2019: Trump Brags about Stock Market Gains - Obama Did Better

 

October 1, 2019: A new report shows U.S. manufacturing output has slipped to the lowest level since June 2009. 

The Dow Jones drops 344 points on the news.

Yeah - the Dow Jones went way up.

 

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Obama vs. Trump: The tale of the ticker tape.

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Since Mr. Trump looks at stock market numbers as the ultimate gauge of success, any decline sets his teeth on edge. That means tweeting. And tweeting means stupidity for sure. “You cannot judge my Stock Market performance since the Inauguration,” he insists, “which was very good, but only from the day after the big Election Win, which was spectacular due to the euphoria of getting Obama/Biden OUT, & getting Trump/Pence IN. Went up BIG between Nov. 9 & Inauguration!” 

We have addressed this claim before, due to the fact that Trump continues to misstate basic facts (sometimes known as practicing “Trump Math”). Sadly, his silly supporters believe him every time. 

A person grounded in reality can easily check this out. Starting from the moment Mr. Obama sat down in the White House and ending on January 16, 2017, the last trading day before the end of his second term, the Dow rose 148.3 percent. That would allow Obama to edge out Ronald Reagan, for third best stock market performance under any U.S. president in the last century (not counting Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had nearly twice as long to oversee gains). 

Second place would go to Hillary Clinton’s husband, the philandering fool, William Jefferson Clinton.

 

The gold medal would be draped round the neck of Calvin Coolidge, a staunch Republican of the old, small-government, balanced budget, conservative stripe. You’d probably want to rip it right off, since a few months after he left office the Great Crash of 1929 sent the economy into a tailspin. 

The Great Depression then commenced. 

More recently, Trump and his enablers and the Republican Party, generally, would like you to forget. With George W. Bush steering the ship of state, the markets first boomed. Then busted. The Dow Jones hit 14,165 on October 11, 2007. Then the U.S. economy ran into a hidden reef and started to sink. A massive housing bubble burst. Banks wobbled and went under. Wall Street giants teetered on the edge of ruin. Consumer spending contracted. Auto sales plummeted. By the time Obama was sworn in, the Dow had shed nearly six thousand points.

 

On January 16, 2009, the last trading day before he took over, the Dow stood at 8,291. The skid continued for two more months. On March 9, the market bottomed at 6,547. Or, as Warren Buffett put it, the economy had “fallen off a cliff.” Investors had lost $13 trillion, or 59.9 percent of their money. 

It is true, then, that markets have done nicely under Trump. This blogger, who is heavily invested, is happy about that. 

The markets did better – to this point in Obama’s first term than they have under Trump. 

Frankly, Trump makes this kind of, “the markets were going to crash if Hillary won the election” stuff up. (See: 2/7/20.)

 

I’m a big fan of facts. So, I go to the charts. I’m not turning up an exact figure for October 1, 2011, but based on a comparison chart prepared by macrotrends, by early October in 2011, the Dow Jones was up 49.4 percent with Obama running the show. 

At the same point in his first term in the White House, Trump has the markets up 36.2 percent.