Biden Has Highest Stock Market Gains After One Year
November 2021 - If you were to ask people to define what success means to them, you're sure to get a variety of answers. Many Americans still equate success with wealth, though. Certainly Donald Trump does. Not only does he like telling people how rich he is (although he usually exaggerates his net worth, if you read the analyses that Forbes and Fortune magazines have published), he always was touting the stock market as the most important indicator of whether his Presidency was a success.
He began that line of argument shortly after the 2016 elections when, after the stock market initially fell, it quickly continued the rise it had experienced throughout the eight years of the Obama-Biden administration. If you only listened to Mr. Trump, though, you wouldn't be alone in believing he was responsible for the most amazing bull market in history.
But how does Mr. Trump's first year stack up with the man who defeated him in 2020, Joe Biden? Or with any other first year stock market performances following a Presidential election? Bloomberg.com decided to answer those questions by looking at roughly the last 100 years and you may be surprised at what they found: measured on the one year anniversary of their election, and using the S&P 500 as the yardstick, President Biden had the best first year stock market run in history.
Six other Presidential victors also did better than Mr. Trump. And all of those other candidates could point to their own actions as being the reason for the market's rise. These other Presidents didn't just ride the economic coattails of the previous administration, as Mr. Trump did. (Mr. Trump's two main economic initiatives, his tax cuts for the already-wealthy and his ham-handed tariff policy, both occurred later in his Presidency and, per the vast majority of economists, had minimal affect on the economy.)
Below is a nice graph that Bloomberg published, which displays some of the results of their study in a bar chart format:
As with most other economic indicators, this study again shows that Democratic Presidents usually are more successful at managing the economy than Republican Presidents. In this case the measuring stick is stock market performance, but you'll see the same results if you look at economic growth, unemployment rates, etc. Which is nothing new to us, but probably is surprising to those Citizens who only get their news from Fox and other right-wing media voices.
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