Finance

Biden Breaks Long Silence On Record Stock Market Highs, A Metric Trump Bragged About Constantly

The first 100 days of the Biden administration were the strongest for the stock market of any president for at least the last 75 years.

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We should all know by now that a surging stock market does not necessarily translate into a healthy economy overall. It is also important to recognize that a president, acting alone, does not really have much control over stock prices, especially in the short-term.

All that being said, gains in the equities markets are easily measured and are objective. This makes stock market performance an attractive metric when it comes to gauging a president’s economic capabilities.

Donald Trump has long been aware of the persuasiveness of stock market returns. Before he was kicked off Twitter for using it to further radicalize his supporters who attacked the U.S. Capitol, Trump tweeted dozens of times to claim credit for the stock market’s performance during his tenure.

Of course, as a concept, “nuance” is as foreign to Trump as “exercise” or “laughter.” When the stock market was doing quite well early in his term, Trump failed to point out that it had done equally as well or better under the administrations of recent Democratic presidents. As he presided over a series of stock market crashes of varying severity in 2018, 2019, and 2020, Trump fell silent on the issue.

With stocks hitting new records once again, Trump has now turned to his Truth Social platform (part of a publicly traded company whose own stock price has cratered) to try to claim personal credit for stock market gains more than three years into Biden’s term. Trump also recently tried implying that the stock market doesn’t matter so much after all.

In contrast to Trump, Joe Biden, after he was elected, studiously avoided statements about stock performance, even as the stock market notched 33 record highs during the first six months of his presidency (Trump had wrongly predicted a stock market collapse when Biden took office). The first 100 days of the Biden administration were the strongest for the stock market of any president for at least the last 75 years.

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As it does, the stock market dipped, and recovered, and surged numerous times as Biden’s presidency really got underway. The first half of 2024, however, has been particularly impressive. Stock market records have been repeatedly smashed.

In early February, for instance, the S&P 500 finished a trading day above 5,000 for the first time ever. Other stock indexes soon followed suit.

A few weeks after the S&P 500’s milestone, the Dow Jones Industrial Average surmounted a record-high 40,000 points. Driven in part by the strong performance of chipmaker Nvidia, the Nasdaq breached 17,000 for the first time on May 28. Whichever major stock index you want to look at, new records, as well as big, round numbers, have been plentiful.

This time, the Biden campaign, if not the man himself, appears to have gotten over stock market shyness.

On the day the Dow crossed 40,000, Biden’s campaign communication director used the occasion to contrast his boss’s record on the stock market with that of Donald Trump (when the Dow hit 30,000 late in Trump’s term, Trump held a White House press conference to tout the achievement). With regard to the Dow passing the 40,000 point threshold, the White House press secretary got in a few words on the new record, as did White House social media accounts and Biden campaign press releases.

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Biden has remained reticent in directly addressing the stock market himself. He previously noted its many shortcomings as an indicator of broader economic health, and seems to have been burned by temporary market downturns following the few occasions he’s personally commented on stock performance in the past.

But what does Biden have to lose here? I don’t need to be a pollster to state with some confidence that there are approximately zero voters out there who are committed to voting for Biden only so long as he remains silent about record stock market highs.

Biden is not getting any credit for keeping quiet when the stock market performs well. With perceptions of the economy being one of Biden’s greatest political vulnerabilities, it is difficult to imagine that highlighting positive aspects of the economy could do anything but help his campaign.

The stock market has pulled back from some of these recent records, and there will obviously be many more ebbs and flows before the November election. But the Biden campaign has finally broken its silence on solid stock performance: This is one Trump tactic the Biden team can’t afford to ignore any longer.

Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made 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 [email protected].

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