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Trump’s Stock Market Now Worst Since Double-Recession George W. Bush

To-be-sure, no other modern U.S. leader has faced an event quite like a global health pandemic.

Trump’s Stock Market Now Worst Since Double-Recession George W. Bush
A trader points to monitor displaying an S&P 500 Index (SPX) chart on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York, U.S. (Photographer: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg)

(Bloomberg) -- The return on stocks since Donald Trump’s presidential election win in 2016 has slumped to 24% thanks to the historic rout the past three weeks, undercutting what had been a better-than-average gain for American leaders over the past half century.

That leaves him on course for the worst performance since George W. Bush’s second term, by the metric of total return on the S&P 500 Index. Equity investors saw more than double the returns under Jimmy Carter, who battled stagflation and foreign-policy crises in the late 1970s. The Trump gain is now on par with Richard Nixon’s first term.

Trump’s Stock Market Now Worst Since Double-Recession George W. Bush

The lack of inflation nowadays means that in real terms, Trump still comes out ahead of Carter, who lost his re-election bid to Ronald Reagan. But by any measure he’s now well behind the 63% climb in Barack Obama’s second term. That Obama mark is slightly less than the total return for Trump when Wall Street hit a record high on Feb. 19.

Equities may still rebound by election day on Nov. 3 and many strategists, at least before Thursday’s crash on Wall Street, were predicting a recovery once the coronavirus peaks, potentially in the second quarter. But the sudden collapse in shares underlines the communications challenge for Trump, who had repeatedly touted the gains since his election as a key achievement for his administration.

PresidentTotal Return
Donald Trump24%
Obama II63%
Barack Obama I55%
Bush II-3.9%
George W. Bush I-12%
Clinton II113%
Bill Clinton I89%
George H.W. Bush74%
Reagan II87%
Ronald Reagan I59%
Jimmy Carter56%
Nixon II6.3%
Richard Nixon I26%
Average48%
Note: measured from election day to election day, except for George W. Bush’s first term, which is measured from the Supreme Court decision that secured his 2000 win.

To-be-sure, no other modern U.S. leader has faced an event quite like a global health pandemic. Its spread is causing an unprecedented shock to economies all over the world as policy makers grapple with ways to shield their populations from the deadly virus.

But Trump’s also associated himself with the market to a degree unmatched by recent peers. He tweeted “Stock Market starting to look very good to me!” on Feb. 24. It’s plunged 23% since then.

The S&P 500 crashed into a bear market on Thursday after Trump’s Oval Office address the evening before failed to spur confidence that the administration will avert the first recession since the global financial crisis. Trump stopped short of a broad-brush fiscal package.

And his assurance that “no nation is more prepared” for the coronavirus conflicted with the assessment the next day from the leading U.S. infectious-disease official that America’s testing system is failing.

“The longer the social-distancing without offsetting stimulus continues, the lower the odds of Trump winning the election will go,” Evercore ISI strategists including Dennis DeBusschere wrote in a note Thursday.

To contact the reporter on this story: Christopher Anstey in Tokyo at canstey@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Christopher Anstey at canstey@bloomberg.net, Cormac Mullen, Ravil Shirodkar

©2020 Bloomberg L.P.

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