In some ways, this makes sense. Presidents influence decisions on tariffs, immigration, permitting, and war that can all have big effects on the stock

Do Presidents Affect The Stock Market?

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2024-10-25 20:30:10

In some ways, this makes sense. Presidents influence decisions on tariffs, immigration, permitting, and war that can all have big effects on the stock market. On the other hand, the stock market seems to closely follow long-term trends and it’s not clear which presidents if any have been successful in deviating from this trend.

I wanted to investigate this more thoroughly so I downloaded the price performance of the total market stock index from 1871-2023 from Robert Schiller’s website here and joined it with a bunch of information on presidents.

Here’s what the overall index looks from Rutherford B. Hayes to Donald Trump. It’s more volatile than the graph above because it’s just the stock prices, not the returns from holding the stock including dividends.

The presidents are labeled at the end of their terms. All the code and data for the graphs below is available in this github repo in case you want to check or extend this work!