Trump says ‘stock market would be down 10,000 points by now’ had ‘the opposition’ done this
President Donald Trump on Tuesday tweeted that the stock market would effectively have crashed had he lost the 2016 race for the White House, reiterating a number of similar statements he has made that have assigned credit to his administration for buoying financial markets over the past two-plus years.
Trump didn’t specify which benchmark he was referencing but, the 45th president was likely referring to the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, +0.08% which has gained 42%, or more than 7,600 points, since the day before his stunning victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton on Nov. 8, 2016. (A 10,000-point fall in the Dow would have taken the blue-chip gauge to 8,259, representing a 55% tumble.)
Meanwhile, the S&P 500 SPX, +0.19% has climbed 30.2% and the technology-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index COMP, +0.21% has advanced by roughly 45% over the same period, according to FactSet data.
Perhaps more than any other president, Trump has hitched his success to that of the stock market.
He has signed into law a late-2017 corporate tax cut that delivered a fillip to U.S. stocks. However, Trump is dogged by an investigation into whether his presidential campaign colluded with Russia and his hard-charging tactic in negotiations with China on tariffs has helped to roil markets, even if there is hope that the testy discussions lead to a fairer trade pact between the two largest economies in the world.
Reality
Donald Trump is again trying to take credit for a stock market that was booming, at the start of his presidency.
The reality is, the stock market was booming years before he took office, smashing an all-time record in 2014, thanks to the economic policies of President Barack Obama.