According to anaylsis by Thomson Reuters Business News the Obama Presidency has been one of the most succesful ever for the stock market.
http://money.msn.com/business-news/article.aspx?feed=OBR&date=20120810&id=15439029
Wonder how Mitt Romney's "Blind Trust" has fared under Obama?
Among my favorite lines is near the end:
John Manley, chief equity strategist at Wells Fargo Funds Management, said Obama also wins points for acting swiftly in the early days of his presidency to prevent a deep recession from becoming a full-fledged depression. "That quite rightly gives him credit for a decent run in the stock market," he said.
The only refrain you ever hear from Mittens is "This President has been a failure." I'm guessing he has NOT read this article.
Obama had very little to do with the stock market recovery. There, I said it. Obama took office at the end of January 2009, which was about 5 weeks before the stock market bottomed out. At that point, the DOW was at its point lowest in 10 years. The economy was in very bad shape, but the market as usual had overreacted to the economies poor state. Naturally, the only thing for the market to do at that point was correct back upwards, which it did by the end of 2009 to about 10,000. Markets are cyclical and always oscillates from up to down and back again. We have had a 30% recovery since the market hit the balanced low point of about 10,000 but to say that it recovered due to what Obama did is ignorance(to say that Bush caused the downturn in the first place is even worse, so don't start). It would have taken an extraordinarily bad president to result in the market not improving over the last four years. One could also argue that the debt incurred to try and stimulate the market has put us in worse shape than in 2008. Time will tell, but the natural course of the market would have brought it back up regardless of who was sitting in the Oval office. To quote your own article;
"The stock market is a barometer not of the absolute level of the economy but of improvement in the economy," said former Merrill Lynch strategist Richard Bernstein, who now runs his own investment management firm. "There is no doubt the economy has improved in the last four years."
Conventional wisdom has it that a stock market rally is good news for a sitting president, and it often has been. But not all rallies are the same, and the lack of a concurrent boost in home values, along with the weak job market, may mean the gains over the last three years don't have the same benefit for Obama."
Bernstein never acknowledges any association of any kind with the presidency; this was just clever editing by the author. Also, it shows that the economy itself has not improved over the last four years. The market is a measure of investor sentiment, not necessarily the overall economy. We are not in the doom and gloom scenario that we thought we were in 4 years ago, but we aren't even close to out of the woods yet. Once we get our debt to GDP ratio in better shape and improve the job statistics, then we can say the economy is better. We have started to improve the housing market, which is a good start; we still have a long way to go.
Captain, Which Global Equity Fund do you manage?
I assume you would also give him no credit for putting two decorative piercings in Osama Bin Laden's head?
It doesn't take a fund manager to know that the stock market is different than the economy and that just because the stock market goes up it doesn't mean that the underlying fundamentals of the economy have improved. As I said before, the stock market is a measure of investor sentiment, not a baramoter of the national economy. A lot of wealth is tied up in the stock market, so it influences the net wealth and retirement plans of a lot of Americans, but it is not the only place where wealth is made or stored in this country. The bond market is far larger than the equity market and the amount of national wealth tied up in real estate trumps both.
The author was merely pointing out two coincidental occurances, but like clockwork somebody on here chose to interpret that as Obama single handedly influencing the buying habits of institutional investors across the country. Did Obama also single handedly find the compound where Osama was hiding and pull the trigger himself?
Well I could not disagree with you more. Who the President is and the decisions/policies he introduces make all the difference. If you look back over the past 20 years there is more than enough evidence to support that.
Remember "W"? Huge tax cuts for really rich people combined with two poorly concieved and poorly executed wars and the outcome was..............................?
2 trillion spent bombing select locations throughout the middle east while bridges are crumbling in Minnesota
(Aug 1 2007)?
Oh that's right, I forgot. It wasn't "W", it was that cute litte muppet Ernie he kept in a desk in the Oval office.
You do remember that "W" in 2002, said "I don't know where Bin Laden is. I have no idea and really don't care. It's not that important. It's not our priority. " Later adding "I am truly not that concerned about him."
Who the President is and the decisions he makes really do make all the difference.
Thats why its all Bush's fault. Right?
Not surprising since many companies are sitting on a good bit of cash right now.