The stock market loves Democrats
So says Bloomberg, anyway:
The BGOV Barometer shows that, over the five decades since John F. Kennedy was inaugurated, $1,000 invested in a hypothetical fund that tracks the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index (SPX) only when Democrats are in the White House would have been worth $10,920 at the close of trading yesterday. That’s more than nine times the dollar return an investor would have realized from following a similar strategy during Republican administrations.
A $1,000 stake invested in a fund that followed the S&P 500 under Republican presidents, starting with Richard Nixon, would have grown to $2,087 on the day George W. Bush left office...The Democratic edge is so large that the party comes out ahead even without counting Bill Clinton (the Democrat with the biggest S&P 500 gain) and George W. Bush (the Republican with the worst market record).
Is some of this due to policy decisions? Perhaps. But note that “every Republican president since at least the end of World War II has faced a recession during his first term in office.” That accounts for much of the difference.
Perhaps those recessions are due to poor economic policy making. But I doubt it. Or perhaps policies their Democratic predecessors are making is leading to recessions shortly after they leave office. That seems dubious, too.
More likely, this is just a small sample size, and the president’s influence on the economy is far more limited than we tend to admit.
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