Every once in a while, the liberal media is compelled to make a concession, even if it doesn’t serve their recession narrative.
Liberal outlet Bloomberg News tweeted Nov. 17 that “The stock market seems to like Donald Trump more than any president since the 1950s,” and proceeded to place the president in fourth place behind former presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower. The tweet summarized a Nov. 11 report done by Bloomberg opinion columnist Justin Fox.
Fox stated in his report that “it’s been three years of listening to Donald Trump bragging about how great the stock market is doing. Contrary to one now-infamous pre-election prediction, it has done quite well.”
Particularly intriguing is the study’s measurement of the S&P 500 total return (adjusted for inflation) for the three years since the initial election of every president since Herbert Hoover. S&P 500 total return for Trump clocked in at 44.3 percent. Former-president Barack Obama, Fox admitted, came in eighth place, with a 25.1 percent total return.
Fox noted early in the study that market indices (DJIA, S&P, Nasdaq, etc.) are “imperfect economic indicators” that “reflect investors’ beliefs about how well publicly traded corporations are doing and will do in the future, not necessarily the reality of how publicly traded corporations are doing — or of how well the rest of us are doing.”
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Still, Fox conceded that the advantage of the S&P 500 as a performance indicator is that it is “(1) frequently updated, (2) available back to 1926 and (3) not subject to measurement error in the way that, say, the unemployment rate or GDP are.”
The longest bull market on record is now “the best bull market ever,” [emphasis added] CNBC reported Nov. 14. The current market boom, which started March 9, 2009, “has enjoyed a whopping 468% gain for the S&P 500 through the first day of November, making this record-long bull run also the best-performing one since World War II, according to The Leuthold Group.”
The S&P 500, according to CNBC, “climbed more than 35% since Trump’s inauguration in January 2017.” CNBC also acknowledged that “President Donald Trump has delivered on promises to cut corporate taxes and regulations and promote activity through more aggressive government spending.”
It’s a wonder what economist Paul Krugman must be thinking right now of his prediction record after once claiming during the 2016 election that markets would “never” recover under Trump. He recanted in a tweet on the next day, saying he was having “second thoughts.”
Fox also admitted that Trump’s fourth-place ranking among the past 14 presidents was “pretty good!” He qualified that there wasn’t a “whole lot” separating him from former presidents John F. Kennedy (5th place; 41.6%), Bill Clinton (6th place; 41.2%) and George H.W. Bush (7th place; 38.1%), and also suggested that “A bad week or two, and he [Trump] could easily fall to eighth place. On the other hand, falling to ninth would take some work, as would catching up to Dwight Eisenhower for third.”
As far as letter grades go, Fox was willing to give Trump a “solid B” since his election.
Fox also took time to address those in the liberal media who consider measurements from inauguration day more accurate than those taken since election day. Liberal media outlet Fortune used the “inauguration day” measurement method. Fortune conceded “that the S&P 500 was at “an all-time high” Nov. 1, while continuing to whine that “Markets still performed far better under Obama than Trump.”
Fox noted:
“Some prefer to track stock market performance from Inauguration Day, and CNN has a handy online tracker that already does this for Trump and the last few presidents. Trump argues that one should measure from Election Day, and while he surely does so mainly because it makes him look better, he also happens to be right. Market indices are forward-looking metrics, and were already reflecting investors’ opinions on a Trump presidency on Nov. 9, 2016” [emphasis added].
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