3,000 more points: That's how far the Dow has to fall before you can start saying Trump's been bad for the stock market, writes Brett Arends:
That’s how much further the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, +1.22% has to fall before you can start saying Trump’s been bad for the stock market.
As the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan said: “Everyone is entitled to their own opinions. But not their own facts.” I was worried about what would happen to the stock market if Trump was elected. I feared there might be an initial panic, and then a lot of turmoil. Both seemed real hazards based on everything he’d said. But I was wrong. I’ve been very pleasantly surprised at the way the market, and the economy, have shrugged off all his melodrama in Washington.Since Trump’s election, the S&P 500 Index SPY, +1.68% has produced a 42% total return, including dividends.
Actually, the returns since Trump took office are already more than you’d expect for the entirety of an average four-year term. I doubt very much the media would be saying, “Who cares if the Dow is down under Trump? Most people don’t have money in the stock market anyway.”It’s dollars to doughnuts that in newsrooms across America, editors have been frantically commissioning fresh “I told you so” articles since the latest turmoil began a couple of weeks ago. They were probably ready to run Wednesday, until the Dow rallied.It’s possible his tax cuts had no effect on markets. Or his lighter touch on federal regulations.
The stock market had already been booming for eight years. Shares were very expensive by several long-term measures. Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve was raising interest rates and withdrawing the monetary stimulus it had ejected into the economy after the financial crisis. If “quantitative easing” drove stock prices up, shouldn’t “quantitative tightening” have brought them down?Let the record show that right-wing partisans were just as bad about Obama’s market as the left-wing partisans are now.
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