Finance

Blame Trump's Drunken-Boxing Style Economic Non-Policy For Worst Annual Stock Market Returns Since The Financial Crisis

If President Trump had one iota of financial sense, he'd publicly take responsibility for the recent market volatility.

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I do my best to keep this column from becoming just another piece of commentary on the daily ups and downs of the financial markets. Today, however, I feel I would be remiss if I didn’t address the stock market elephant in the room: 2018 was the worst year for stocks since 2008, the midst of the financial crisis.

For 2018, the Dow, the S&P 500, and the Nasdaq were down 5.6 percent, 6.2 percent, and 4 percent, respectively. December was particularly brutal. It was the worst December for stocks since 1931, and the worst Christmas Eve ever for the Dow. Both the S&P 500 and the Dow started December anemically in the black for the year, but saw declines of close to 9 percent just over the course of the month.

The unemployment rate is hovering at around 3.7 percent, a low figure historically. Corporate profits, spurred by a generous tax break for corporations, were near historic highs, with U.S. companies raking in profits of approximately $2.24 trillion in the second quarter of 2018 alone. While financial commentators are fond of saying that the stock market is not the economy, it is unusual for the stock market to be performing quite this badly when other economic indicators are relatively strong.

There are a lot of theories about what went so wrong in the stock market in 2018, and particularly in December of 2018, and there is some validity to all of them. A slowing U.S. housing market and weaker global growth forecasts for 2019 have something to do with it. So do inflation fears and concerns about new regulatory oversight in the tech sector. Another key factor is “political dysfunction,” which is mentioned by almost all of the financial commentators, but is downplayed in what I’m assuming is a function of journalists’ ongoing attempts at political balance.

On December 4, the President of the United States tweeted, “I am a Tariff Man.” His administration backed away from claims made previously of a truce with China in Trump’s trade war. Stocks tumbled. Later in December, it leaked that Trump was asking whether he could fire Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell for, you know, doing his job. Stocks continued their slump. Then, after Trump’s cronies assured everyone he would not try to fire his Fed Chairman (along with reports of strong holiday sales from retailers), markets soared the day after Christmas. For some reason during all of this, Treasury Secretary and guy-looking-at-the-wrong-camera Steve Mnuchin was calling America’s six largest banks and asking their confused CEOs whether they had ample credit available to extend to businesses and consumers, which is weird. When Mnuchin announced his calls via Twitter and said that the banks had plenty of liquidity, everyone stared blankly for a moment and then started wondering whether this thing that nobody had thought was a problem was actually yet another thing we should all be worrying about.

Look, under normal circumstances, I would be the first to agree that a president does not necessarily deserve the credit, or the blame, for whatever the stock market is doing. A president only has a limited amount of control over the stock market, particularly in the short term. But these are not normal circumstances. And if a guy claims credit dozens and dozens of times when the stock market is thriving, he has surely invited some of the blame when things go south.

A president does not normally wonder out loud whether he can fire his own Fed chairman, and then send out his goons a few days later to say he is no longer considering any such thing. A president doesn’t normally start a trade war and slap a bunch of tariffs on everything, then repeatedly vacillate between saying he wants to end it and saying he wants to ramp it up. Most presidents do not have half a dozen former aides and advisers who have pleaded guilty to various crimes at the midway point of the first term. How in the world is a market, even if it is behaving rationally, supposed to price all of this in?

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If President Trump had one iota of financial sense, he’d publicly take responsibility for the recent market volatility, promise more stable and prudent financial policymaking in the future, and assure everyone that their 401(k) balances will recover — and they will, eventually. But “measured” is not Trump’s style. My guess is that his stream-of-consciousness economics are here to stay as long as he is. And in that case, we should all be prepared to face a lot more months like December.

Jonathan Wolf is a litigation associate at a midsize, full-service Minnesota firm. He also teaches as an adjunct writing professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, has written for a wide variety of publications, and makes it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.

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