Thursday, November 06, 2008

Is the market really better under a Democratic administration?

I was checking the stock market at CNBC a few minutes ago and clicked on an article entitled, "Build an Investment Strategy for an Obama Presidency." Here is what I learned:

To shift your long-term investment strategy so that you take advantage of the next four years - and then some - stay with a diversified portfolio but consider making adjustments in your holdings to capitalize on an Obama presidency. Zachary Karabell, economist and president of River Twice Research, reminded that despite popular belief, the stock market tends to do better under a Democratic administration than a Republican administration.


I remember reading about some study on Democrats being better for the market than Republicans a while back in the blogosphere and decided to find out if this was true. Not according to The Wall Street Journal that says divided government is best for the market:
Then there are the various party mixes between the president and Congress. If John McCain wins and we have a Republican president and a Democratic Congress, history leads us to expect an average 10.3% total return from stocks and 3.3% real GDP growth. If Barack Obama wins, and we have a Democratic Congress too, then according to history stocks will average 13.8%, and real GDP growth 3.3%.

But that's no argument for voting for Mr. Obama. Vote for Mr. McCain -- but vote for Republican senators and representatives too. When Republicans have controlled the whole government, it blows away anything Democrats can do. Stocks have averaged 17.5%and real GDP growth 3.3%.

By the way, as fond as Democrats are of saying how poorly stocks have performed under George W. Bush, here's a sobering fact: Stocks averaged 14.1% return in those Bush years when Republicans controlled Congress -- and when Democrats got in there and mucked things up, the average has been a loss of 8.9%. That's not even including 2008 year-to-date, which doesn't look so pretty.

If the electorate were really smart, it would elect a Democratic president and a Republican Congress. Under that deal, stocks have averaged a 20.2% total return, and real GDP averaged 4%. That tells us that economic and stock market success isn't really about partisan politics at all. Sadly, nobody has a political incentive to conduct a study about that.


No, I guess not.

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31 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

The GOP dis control the works for a number of years recently and we got the huge deficit we now have and the meltdown we now have that in large measure is the result of deregulation promulgated by the GOP (and passively ok'd by Dems).

The stock market is one thing. Unemployment, housing slump, health care etc are additional concerns for many who do not devote hours to investing and earning in the market. Imagine if McCain had his dream come true and we had privatized social security! then the McCain govt would have to bail that out too.
In fact, many of us look at what has been accomplished, or not done, in the past control of the congress and the White House and say: enough. Change it all. It can't be worse.

When GOP controlled it all, there was no cry about the need for divided govt. Suddenly, it is useful?

A Republican Congress would not give us the health care we need. And they would be eating their livers when a Dem president appoints Supreme Court judges, who will not likely turn back the clock on a woman's right to choose.

As Hamlet said to his pal Polonious: there is more to life in America than what is dreamt of in the WSJ.

4:35 PM, November 06, 2008  
Blogger DADvocate said...

This helps explain why the market has tanked the last two days.

The Dem/Repub establishment needs a third party to at least rattle their cages. Maybe the Libertarians can do that or gain more power themselves.

4:42 PM, November 06, 2008  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

How many Libertarians actually do not vote GOP?

The most interesting aspect of the current research into party control has little to do with which party has Congress or the White House -- its when Congress is in session or not:

"Using historical pricing on the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA), the Standard and Poor’s 500 Stock Index (S&P 500), the Center for Research in Security Prices (CRSP) Equal-Weighted Returns Index and Value-Weighted Returns Index, Ferguson and Witte* find that, “Depending on the index, daily returns when Congress is in session range from 1 to 4 basis points per day. When Congress is out of session returns range from 5 to 15 basis points a day.”

Media spin aside, in a striking conclusion Ferguson and Witte remind their readers that, “Fully 90 percent of the historical capital gains on the DJIA occurred on days when Congress was out of session"

We are tempted to make the tongue-in-cheek observation that when Congress -- of either party -- is in session, it is dangerous to your portfolio's health!

>

UPDATE October 31, 2006 10:11 am

And as we have discussed in the past, it is important to consider Multiple Variables in Market Analysis. Who controls the Congress or Presidency is but one issue out of 100's if not 1,000's, and perhaps a minor one at that . . .

4:47 PM, November 06, 2008  
Blogger flambeaux said...

"A Republican Congress would not give us the health care we need."

This attitude tells all you need to know about liberal philosophy and why it will collapse.

4:59 PM, November 06, 2008  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

this remark tells all you need to know about conservative philosophy and why it will collapse...as we have just witnessed in the election

5:08 PM, November 06, 2008  
Blogger bb said...

I think that Fred is a talking points machine.

Y'know Fred, it's rude to come onto someone's site and fill up their comments with a lot of blather.

It's apparent from your posts that you're aping positions that you don't understand.

BTW 'promulgated' deregulation is irrelevant to actual deregulation - i.e. the term doesn't mean what you seem to think that it means.

5:38 PM, November 06, 2008  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

well I won't bopther you then. But I think Mr Greenspan and I agree in what deregulation had to do with things:<

http://bonddad.blogspot.com/2008/10/greenspan-admits-deregulation-didnt.html

enjoy...I try meantime, to imagine all the millions of american voters voting split ballots so they can have a divided govt for their stock portfolios.

6:36 PM, November 06, 2008  
Blogger Micajah said...

Rather than look at which party has a majority in the Congress or holds the White House, it might be more helpful to look at what is done by the people who appear to be in charge.

When Fred says this, he is apparently wrong:
"...the meltdown we now have that in large measure is the result of deregulation promulgated by the GOP (and passively ok'd by Dems)."

But, where would he look to find that he is wrong?

I saw a couple of articles in the Washington Post and (if I recall correctly) Forbes which showed that the only thing resembling "deregulation" was the Democrats' successful opposition to Republican efforts in 2004, 2005, and 2006 to enact stricter regulations on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Far from "passively accepting" deregulation, the Democrats actively opposed regulation.

When Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac finally collapsed, their "toxic" mortgage-backed securities had already poisoned the financial system.

Yet, Fred is not alone in believing that the GOP's general preference for deregulation is to blame. The "MSM" simply hasn't done an acceptable job in telling people who the deregulators in this instance were.

In such cases, we need to know who did what about what -- not who held the majority in Congress. The Democrats were in the minority in those years, but the filibuster rule in the Senate allowed them to stop the Republican effort to regulate those government-sponsored enterprises before it was too late.

6:38 PM, November 06, 2008  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

fred, you have it 100% backwards.

You have been listening to, and reading from, one side of a story. The same story that got a socialist elected in a republic. It took them years, but they got it done. You seem to be one of those who bought it hook, line, and sinker.

Less than ten minutes after his acceptance speech, Obama was already telling those who put him there that everything he promised wouldn't happen right away. Probably not in a year, and probably not even by the end of his first 4 years. I'm betting it won't happen at all.

6:44 PM, November 06, 2008  
Blogger Trust said...

I saw on TV where it was stated that the market goes up 4% in the first year of a Republican administration and 6% in the first year of a Democrat administration. The problem with these numbers is that most of the first yea of a new administration is under the fiscal polices of the preceding administration. I believe the Federal Government's fiscal year begins on October 1.

6:46 PM, November 06, 2008  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Consider the frog and the pot of water on the stove.

6:46 PM, November 06, 2008  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

trust - as far as the dems go, it's up 6% after a 10% drop the day after the election. Humor!

By the way, look at the Dow today for verification. Largest drop EVER after a democrat win. The Dow always drops after a democrat win. This was just the worst, that's all.

6:49 PM, November 06, 2008  
Blogger Micajah said...

I see that Fred added something while I was typing.

That is an interesting article about Greenspan's testimony. As he noted, his policy preference has always been against government regulation -- and it worked for 40 years.

The specific example he gives, other than the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac problem, refers to something called the Commodities Trading Modernization Act of 1999, if I recall correctly.

The article says: "Greenspan said he was ``partially'' wrong in opposing regulation of derivatives and acknowledged that financial institutions didn't protect shareholders and investments as well as he expected."

That bill was introduced by Senator Lugar (I think he's a "moderate.") and co-sponsored by senators Tom Harkin (really liberal), Tim Johnson (I don't know his leanings), and Phil Gramm (really conservative).

It was enacted with no significant opposition after years of debate and committee hearings.

It did one significant thing by specifically deciding not to begin regulating the "credit default swaps" market. They had not previously been regulated, so "deregulation" is not what happened.

Those "derivatives" known as credit default swaps were used to make it possible to believe that the mortgage-backed securities sold by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac weren't as risky as they were.

So, an apparently genuine bipartisan decision was made to leave them unregulated -- and that appears to have been a mistake. The big guys in the financial system spread the risk of "toxic" mortgage-backed securities all around, so that the credit default swaps ended up endangering many financial firms and thus the entire system.

6:54 PM, November 06, 2008  
Blogger TMink said...

The regulation that nobody is talking about is the government mandate to provide home loans to people who could not afford them. That was the regulation and mandate that started the mess. That and Franklin Raines lying to get a $90 million payday.

Trey

7:02 PM, November 06, 2008  
Blogger Micajah said...

"tmink," the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 did play an important role, but I think the lack of effective regulation was equally at fault.

When the CRA was used to pressure lenders to make risky loans, and then Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (beginning in 1999 from what I've read) began to buy them, we needed a strong regulatory agency to try balancing the risks and capital required to cover those risks.

The government interfered in the market with the CRA, so it needed to do better in regulating to avoid damage from its interference.

As I noted above, the Democrats succeeded in preventing the GOP from enacting stricter regulations to try to balance that risk.

We can't know if the Republicans' bill would have prevented the collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- and then the crisis in the financial system -- but we can know the Democrats prevented enactment of that bill.

7:14 PM, November 06, 2008  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

The $0 down, no doc, low interest loans are still available today. I drove by a house for sale in that manner on the way to work this morning. The monthly payment (PITI) is displayed on a sign next to the for sale sign.

7:26 PM, November 06, 2008  
Blogger TMink said...

micajah, you expressed that much better than I. Thank you.

Trey

10:11 PM, November 06, 2008  
Blogger GawainsGhost said...

It is true that the CRA was not the real culprit in the housing market crash. Rather, it was the Clinton DOJ that pressured banks to make loans to uncreditworthy people, in a failed attempt at fairness. But Bush bears much of the blame as well, as he pushed home ownership (actually debt ownership) to unprecedented levels and failed to regulate the financial industry.

What happened in the late 90s was the repeal of the Glass-Steagle act, which was passed in 1933 to regulate the banking industry. What also happened is that investment banks, which previously were comprised of a few wealthy investors who were using (risking) their own money to make investments, became publicly traded companies. Thus, they started using (risking) shareholders' (other people's) money and became less risk adverse. (Note that all five investment banks are now no longer in existence: one went bankrupt, two were taken over, and two were converted into bank holding companies.)

It is wrong to blame the resulting financial meltdown on Fannie and Freddie, as most of the blame actually lies on Wall Street. Banks started using creative financing, issuing no-documentation, interest-only, adjustable-rate mortgages and the like, then bundling these loans into securities and selling them on the secondary market. These are what are called mortgage backed securities or collateralized debt obligations. In order to minimize risk on these investments, the banks would purchase credit default swaps, which really is a form of insurance.

But the problem was that they couldn't be called insurance, because if they were the banks would have to hold a certain amount of capital in reserve to protect against losses. So they were called swaps instead. It's a loophole in the accounting regulations that allowed banks to avoid capital requirements and increase leverage.

The normal capital requirement is 8% of the loan value to cover for potential losses. But banks using credit default swaps only had to keep 1.6% in capital reserves. This allowed them to make even more loans, because owning swaps made it appear as if the banks were off-loading most of the risk on their loans to another firm. The primary issuer of credit default swaps was American International Group (AIG).

So what happened is that banks started lending a lot with little money in reserve. It was a game taking place across the global financial system in which firms engaged in excessive risk taking and seemingly created money out of nothing, which propelled the markets to unstainable heights. And it worked, for awhile, as long as real estate values kept rising and credit ratings were high.

But what goes up must come down. As more and more borrowers defaulted on their loans, the mortgage backed securities necessarily were downgraded and the credit default swaps were called in. When AIG was downgraded in September, it had to come up with cash, which it didn't have, or the deals would fail and banks would either have to raise capital or dump assets. This is why the Federal Reserve had to step in with an $85 billion bailout to save the company.

It's even worse in Europe, where banks are going bust left and right. What a lot of people fail to understand about the Great Depression is that it did not originate in nor was limited to the United States. It actually started in Europe and spread globally. For anyone interested in reading about the real history of the Great Depression, I highly recommend this blog:

http://www.doctorhousingbubble.com/

It contains a series of articles on the previous and on the current financial crisis, titled "Lessons from the Great Depression." And it is excellent.

I also recommend these sites.

http://calculatedrisk.blogspot.com/

http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/

http://bigpicture.typepad.com/

Finally, and I apologize for the long post, I would note that the ongoing financial crisis did not occur under any one President, but was actually formed over two successive administrations, one Democrat and one Republican. Both share the blame.

1:05 AM, November 07, 2008  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Interesting.

Sad though. Those who had nothing to do with it, for the most part, are again footing the bill. Including, and perhaps mainly, those who aren't even born yet. As has been par for the course for many decades.

I love reading assignments.

One thing though, I'd still love to know what actually was said and done on Jekyll Island back then.

I suppose a screen door on a submarine wouldn't really be a bad idea if that damned water didn't come in.

5:08 AM, November 07, 2008  
Blogger Trust said...

One thing that is better for the market when Democrats are in power is that the press they get is generally better. And as most of us know, perception of the market typically influences the reality of the market (i.e., self fulfilling prophecy).

7:22 AM, November 07, 2008  
Blogger Elusive Wapiti said...

Here's another reason why the market may not do so swell under an Obama administration:

Nationalization of one's retirement accounts. Just like Argentina. I guess the government hates competition with Social Security. Shades of FDR's 1933 gold confiscation, anyone? Hold on to your wallet!

At any rate, we shouldn't be surprised...we elected an avowed socialist to the presidency. What do socialists do?

10:02 AM, November 07, 2008  
Blogger Der Hahn said...

Trust - word!

Our local in-the-tank fishwrapper never missed a chance to trumpet stock market drops before Nov 4.

Guess what makes the front page today following a two-day 10% drop in the market?

Obama selecting his CoS, a fluff piece about the weather, and a report on post-college debt.

10:50 AM, November 07, 2008  
Blogger Alex said...

Democrats have already said they will confiscate people's 401K plans. Thank god I don't have a 401K, the rest of you suckers can eat it.

1:16 PM, November 07, 2008  
Blogger Micajah said...

Gawainsghost, can you explain how the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act's separation of investment and commercial banking contributed to the financial crisis?

It was the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 that repealed this separation of one kind of banking from the other.

I had read this article in the New York Times magazine sometime ago, and it still seems to be accurate:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/28/magazine/28wwln-reconsider.html?ref=business

"The point of Gramm-Leach-Bliley was to tear down the wall, built by Glass-Steagall, separating banks that did risky investing from those that did basic lending. (The mingling of those two helped create a cascade of bank failures during the Depression.) Thus were born Citigroup, Bank of America and J. P. Morgan Chase, behemoths that owned bank branches, bought and sold stocks and shepherded corporate mergers.

"But what else do those firms have in common today? They weren’t the ones that imploded, at least not first. While hardly unscathed, some of them are emerging as survivors amidst the wreckage. The first fatalities were firms that didn’t change all that much in the wake of Gramm-Leach-Bliley. Until their dying day, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers were both classic investment banks."

2:06 PM, November 07, 2008  
Blogger SGT Ted said...

Deficit spending is not a conservative position or principle. So quit trying to conflate W's Christian Socialism with actual conservatism. Conservatism works every time it's tried. We have a Government spending problem, not a lack of money problem.

Universal health care will destroy the US health care system, just like it has in every country its been tried in.

No thanks.

7:58 PM, November 07, 2008  
Blogger GawainsGhost said...

Well, Micajah, I don't believe that the repeal of Glass-Steagall, which I misspelled above, alone led to the financial crisis, but it was a major factor.

In short, the repeal enabled commercial lenders to underwrite and trade instruments such as mortgage-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations and establish so-called structured investment vehicles that bought those securities. We all know how that worked out.

I remember earlier this year seeing some banker, I believe he was at Chase but don't recall exactly, say, "We're suspending our structured investment practice for six months to raise capital." The stupidity of that statement struck me as getting to the core of the problem. I thought, why don't you suspend it for twelve months and raise twice as much capital? Better yet, why don't you suspend it indefinitely and raise infinite capital? Ha ha ha.

9:44 AM, November 08, 2008  
Blogger Peregrine John said...

People think the economy's better under a Democratic President, but it rarely actually is. That's history. The goal is to find a way to make good use of the dichotomy.

10:34 AM, November 10, 2008  
Blogger Male Samizdat said...

I've been away for a bit, but I'm going to vent my spleen about this election now....

1: The people who were bamboozled by the pseudo-messianic aura of Barack Obama are those who expect to get something for nothing - and believe they are entitled to it.

2: The template for Republican victory in elections was written by Ronaldus Magnus (for the Limbaugh-impaired, that's Ronald Reagan) and the 1994 Congressional Republicans.

3: The reasons that Republicans have become pantywaists are two:
(a) They have imbibed deeply of the kool-aid of the popular culture (and thus culturally Democrats)
(b) They are afraid of the MSM.

It's time for a huge purge of the Republican party, and tell the liberal "Republicans" to join their commie-socialist buddies on the jackass side of the aisle. THEN come up with a strategy to communicate conservative ideas outside of the mainstream media. The Internet certainly has made this easier than ever.

In one way, I want Obama to get everything he wants as fast as he wants. I want him to make himself look as stupid as possible on the world's largest stage.

8:54 AM, November 12, 2008  
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