President Donald Trump on Wednesday said the stock market has delivered all-time highs around 100 times since he took office — a reference to records hit by the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq Composite Index a day earlier.
However, it turns out that the 45th U.S. president may be selling the market a bit short, at least by one measure.
Factoring the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, -0.22% S&P 500 SPX, -0.22% Nasdaq Composite COMP, -0.23% , Russell 2000 RUT, +0.19% Dow Jones Transportation Index DJT, +0.87% and the large-capitalization focused Nasdaq-100 NDX, -0.34% major stock gauges have registered 529 all-time closing highs since Trump’s surprise election win over Democratic rival Hillary Clinton on Nov. 8, 2016.
As measured by the point of his inauguration on Jan. 20, 2017, those equity benchmarks have produced 466 records.
| Benchmark | Records since Nov. 8, 2016 | …since Jan. 20, 2017 |
| Dow | 103 | 86 |
| S&P 500 | 90 | 81 |
| Nasdaq | 110 | 96 |
| Russell 2000 | 74 | 61 |
| Dow transports | 40 | 38 |
| Nasdaq-100 | 112 | 104 |
| Source: Dow Jones Market Data |
Trump’s remarks came in front of reporters ahead of a trip to Atlanta with his wife Melania, and comes as the 2020 presidential race comes into greater focus. The president has closely hitched his claim for a second term on how Wall Street performs, viewing it as a key barometer of his own performance.
On Tuesday, the S&P 500 index registered its first record since Sept. 20, while the Nasdaq notched its first all-time closing record since Aug. 29.
Trump has repeatedly blamed the monthslong drought without a record on aggressive policies by the Federal Reserve, led by Chairman Jerome Powell.
Earlier this month, POTUS said “I would say in terms of quantitative tightening, it should actually now be quantitative easing... You would see a rocket ship.”
About a week ago, he added a finer point to that statement in a tweet, saying that “if the Fed had done its job properly, which it has not, the Stock Market would have been up 5000 to 10,000 additional points, and GDP would have been well over 4% instead of 3%.”
Those calls come even after the Fed staged a monetary-policy U-turn at the start of 2019, pointing to signs of global growth and a protracted trade spat between China and the U.S., with that pivot from a more aggressive path of rate increases at least partly credited with helping to deliver a jolt to stocks.
Check out Trump’s comments below:
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