NASDAQ Doubles During Obama Administration

The NASDAQ has doubled since Obama took office. Obviously, those Wall Street capitalists haven't appreciated the seriousness of the GOP warnings that Obama is a socialist intent on destroying the economy.

(It closed today at 2988.97. On Jan 20 of ‘09, it closed at 1476.42.)

Oh, and just for reference, the NASDAQ dropped by nearly half (about 47%, dropping from 2772.73 to the fore-mentioned 1476.42) under George W. Bush.

Many readers would be tempted to say that this is just chance. They could be right. But if so, it seems like chance persistently favors the Democrats when it comes to market performance. Using the Dow to compare the performance of the market under Democrats and Republicans, you get the following table. Quite simply, this table shows the different returns for two families. The one family puts their money into the Dow Jones each time a Republican becomes president and then withdraws it all to put it under the mattress each time a Democrat takes office. The other family invests in the market only during Democratic administrations. If each started with $100,000, their holdings would have been very different by the close of the market today. The Democratic loyalists would have $3.5 million (precisely, $3,475,577) and the Republican loyalists would have only $500k (actually, $509,720). The last column shows how the total for one compares to the other. The Dem's total is 6.82X that of the Republicans; which is just another way of saying that the Rep's total is only 15% of the Democrats. 

One reason for this  might have to do with the big shift in the last century that management guru Peter Drucker said was one of the most under-, or un-reported trends in markets: the rise of ordinary people as investors. At the start of the century, the rich, the elite, held most shares of stock. By the close of the century, through mutual funds and pension funds primarily, average workers - or at least the better paid professionals we could call knowledge workers - held most shares of stock. In this light, the fact that the Democrats who generally do more to favor labor than Republicans (in the UK liberals make this easier to track by simply referring to themselves as the Labour Party) is not so mysterious: better paid labor has more money to invest and this - among other things - helps to drive demand for goods that include both product sales and shares of stock, the two biggest drivers in the rise of stock prices. When labor does better, so do capitalists, in no small part because labor and capitalists have come to overlap so much.