Live data from Hacker News

U.S. Presidents and Comparative Stock Market Performance

endlessmetrics.com

11–20 of 41 posts

Re: U.S. Presidents and Comparative Stock Market Performance

#11
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bush was pretty unlucky. 2 massive crashes during his presidency.

Ya, and neither were completely his fault. However, I do fault him for juicing a good economy when stimulus would be more effective during a downturn when not wasted during upturns. Save in good times, spend in bad would do a lot for stability. 2008 could have been handled much better if he was disciplined enough during the recovery in between (besides, taking more money out of the system would have acted against bub…

people forget Bush was fighting an energy recession, and those were a godsend to many. my brother used the money to apply for college and buy books to give college a go and see how it is, he's an MD now. I disagreed with almost everything Bush did, but that was not one of them.

The same is true for Trump, in the sense had it not been for the Trump tax cuts, we would be in a recession right now.

Re: U.S. Presidents and Comparative Stock Market Performance

#12
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ya, and neither were completely his fault. However, I do fault him for juicing a good economy when stimulus would be more effective during a downturn when not wasted during upturns. Save in good times, spend in bad would do a lot for stability. 2008 could have been handled much better if he was disciplined enough during the recovery in between (besides, taking more money out of the system would have acted against bub…

people forget Bush was fighting an energy recession, and those were a godsend to many. my brother used the money to apply for college and buy books to give college a go and see how it is, he's an MD now. I disagreed with almost everything Bush did, but that was not one of them. The same is true for Trump, in the sense had it not been for the Trump tax cuts, we would be in a recession right now.

[flagged]

Re: U.S. Presidents and Comparative Stock Market Performance

#13
post #8

I've always been more curious about this stat when: -President and Congress majority are same party (and by party) -President and Congress majority are different party. I suspect different parties are better, to reign in the excesses of each. But not sure. Maybe I'll do it some time.

If the parties were working for the good of all Americans I think you'd be correct. The Republican party decided to literally impede anything, right or wrong that President Obama did. Democrats changed some rules for lower court justices because Republicans refused to even vote against judges just to claim Obama was leaving seats vacant. That's not governance, that's plain impeding government from doing it's job by people who don't believe government should exist. You cannot have a functional government when people meant to govern it don't believe it should exist.

Re: U.S. Presidents and Comparative Stock Market Performance

#14
Stock variation doesn't really say much other than probably a degree of general confidence about how much profits companies can take.

How about actual corporate earnings? (Thereby normalizing for wacky p/e ratios?)

And what about bond yields? (Because bonds and stocks are the primary assets, valuations flow from one to the other)

Interest rates? (Because cheaper Fed rates entail easy money)

GDP? (Because that's a measure of the economy)

Housing prices? (Because that's a measure of consumer spending, i.e. 'the rest of us')

Housing starts? (A measure of business confidence in consumer)

Employment? (A good measure of overall health)

Inflation? (A variety of factors but it puts the others in perspective)

Instead of this 'stock prices' thing they should show us all that for perspective.

Re: U.S. Presidents and Comparative Stock Market Performance

#17
It's too bad this analysis was done against the Dow Jones Industrial Average which is a price weighted index of only 30 large cap stocks and widely considered to be a poor indicator. Something like the S&P 500 index would would have been a better choice though it doesn't go as far back as the DJIA.

Re: U.S. Presidents and Comparative Stock Market Performance

#18
post #17

It's too bad this analysis was done against the Dow Jones Industrial Average which is a price weighted index of only 30 large cap stocks and widely considered to be a poor indicator. Something like the S&P 500 index would would have been a better choice though it doesn't go as far back as the DJIA.

Although, the Dow doesn't really go back that far either in the sense that it swaps out stocks occasionally, which could cause spurious conclusions to be drawn if not accounted for.

Re: U.S. Presidents and Comparative Stock Market Performance

#19
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bush was pretty unlucky. 2 massive crashes during his presidency.

Ya, and neither were completely his fault. However, I do fault him for juicing a good economy when stimulus would be more effective during a downturn when not wasted during upturns. Save in good times, spend in bad would do a lot for stability. 2008 could have been handled much better if he was disciplined enough during the recovery in between (besides, taking more money out of the system would have acted against bub…

The problem with "save in good times, spend in bad" is that people don't actually save in good times. Even if you raise interest rates, people will still borrow money when times are good because that's when there's profit to be made by investing the borrowed money. They do it less when rates are higher, but they still do it.

The "problem" with the natural cycle is that in bad times people start to default on their debts, which would otherwise cause banks to raise rates to account for the higher risk, which would cause even more defaults. By central banks lowering rates at those times you prevent that from happening, but at the cost of ballooning everyone's debt out of control. Because then people affected by the downturn can borrow even more money at the low rates. So we borrow in good times and borrow even more in bad times. Real debt per capita has been increasing for decades, which obviously isn't sustainable.

But that's what Keynesianism does -- it defers a crash by allowing otherwise uncreditworthy people to take on additional debt rather than filing for bankruptcy, but nobody ever pays the debt back.

Now the problem is times are good except that everybody has too much debt, which is only fine because interest rates are low. Raise them and everything falls apart as the money people are currently using to buy stuff and live their lives is suddenly required to make interest payments on existing debt.

What we need at this point is for people to pay off their debts. But they can't, because the money they borrowed is now inside corporations that never spend it.

So we need to either find a way for that money to get out of corporations and back into the hands of regular people (without crashing the stock market), or print a bunch of new money that isn't derived from debt and give that to regular people so they can use that to pay back their debts with.

Post reply on HN