I receive continuous views of my posts about the Dow under Obama and Trump, with a number of critical comments.
Here is my post from January 2018.
It’s time for an update.
The start of the Obama presidency has now slipped off the 10-year chart on the left. I have the blue arrow pointing off the chart down to 7949, which was the Dow when Obama took office. It was a low-point, as we all know.
Looking back through the Obama years, we had a steady rise of the Dow, with a flatting of the slope in 2015 and modest recovery at the end of 2016.
Trump was elected and took office, and the slope increased. The Dow grew faster for the next 12 months all the way through 2017. But it has sputtered through 2018 and 2019, with significant spikes and drops through those 18 months. The pro-business stance of the Trump administration, the lifting of regulations, has fueled the economy.
However, I would say that when readers say “we have been suffering” through the Obama years, I don’t think that’s accurate, at least not from the view point of the stock market and its growth. Unless Trump starts getting gains again with a steady upward trend, his overall performance from low to high may not be that of the Obama years. We’ll have to wait and see.
What concerns me is the debt.
We have new record deficits. I remember the “fiscally responsible party”, the GOP, making endless noise about Obama’s racking up of debt. Then it stopped. All of a sudden nobody worries about the debt ceiling anymore. The battles in the Republican-controlled Congress about the debt ceiling during the latter Obama years were epic. Now, we just raise the ceiling quietly.
Am I the only one concerned with that?
This tells me I need to create a deficit and debt chart next to put this into perspective. But that’s for another day.