Obama and the Stock Market

Is Obama trying to take credit for the stock market returns over his tenure?  Looks that way.

“One of the constants that I’ve had to deal with over the last few years is folks on Wall Street complaining, even as the stock market went from in the 6,000s to 16,000 or 17,000,” he said, referring to the rise in the Dow Jones Industrial Average during his administration.

I can't update my analysis on this just now, but let me reiterate my basic thesis about Obama and the stock market: 1) what, in general, has been bad for Barack Obama has been good for the stock market; and, 2) the stock market expected 3 very bad things to come of the Obama era, and when it became apparent that only one would materialize, it rose on the reduction of fear rather than on a wave of optimism.  My key posts outlining this are here and here and here.  And here is the gist:

...despite re-election, Barack Obama's popularity has gone consistently down and his power has consistently ebbed since the day he took office.  Even at the supposed height of his influence, he had to scrape, scrounge and have Harry Reid pull a few sneaky tricks to get his signature legislation through.  Beyond that his accomplishments have been nearly nil, and, in my view, the stock market loves it.

The market had big legs up in response, or in absorbing the reality even before the fact, to major Obama defeats, the 2010 midterm elections and the 2014 loss of the Senate.  In general, however, the Obama tenure has been one of slowly eroding power and influence and the market has melted up.  It picked up on his ineffectuality long ago.  For the last year or so, it has been discounting what a post-Obama world might look like.

Having said all that, I DO believe that the Democrats' policies have resulted in the stock returns that we've experienced in recent years, but these results are completely unintentional and diametrically opposed to what Democrats say they want to achieve.  What we are seeing is either profound lack of understanding, on the part of Democrats, of how the world works or a completely phony facade of rhetoric built on top of a policy program specifically designed for the wealthy class.