National Archives and Records Administration via Creative Commons 1.0 That, among other things, gave us the Federal Reserve.Ĭourtesy U.S. The fallout was so bad it actually led to a grassroots revolt and a total realignment of the Democratic Party.Īfter Cleveland fell from grace, the mantle of leadership eventually shifted to Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and William Jennings Bryan, in what is known as the Progressive Era. But then the Panic of 1893 hit the banking system and led to a deep depression. He was respected by voters and by his peers in Washington.
Cleveland, on the other hand, was just unlucky.īy any historical account, he was a responsible president who ran an honest and fiscally sound administration that believed in free trade and sound money. Most of the poorer-performing presidents had their share of mistakes that helped contribute to the lousy market returns of their presidency. These gains were attributable, at least in part, to Bush’s tax and regulatory reforms, which deserve credit.Īlas, Bush also will be remembered for an expensive and controversial war in Iraq and for throwing fiscal restraint out the window with some of the largest budget deficits in history.Ĭourtesy Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs division via Creative Commons 1.0įor the bronze-medal loser, we have to go back to the late 1800s and the second presidency of Grover Cleveland. Stocks rallied from 2003 to the peak in 2007, briefly surpassing their Clinton-era dot-com highs. There were some good market years, of course. Sandwiched between two of the worst bear markets in U.S. If that weren’t bad enough, the 2008 mortgage and banking crisis happened at the tail end of his presidency.
11, 2001, terror attacks helped to push the economy deeper into recession. Poor Dubya had the misfortune of taking office just as the dot-com boom of the 1990s went bust and shortly before the Sept. This list now includes President Joe Biden's performance, and early on, it has been white-hot.Ĭourtesy Eric Draper via Creative Commons 1.0 The following is a ranking of every president since Benjamin Harrison (who, sneak preview, did not do very well) by stock market performance, in order from worst to best. (Yes, a president’s actions aren’t the only thing that moves the stock market, but in many cases throughout history, the commander in chief’s decisions over time significantly contributed to how equities performed.) While we’re at it, we’ll rank every president that we can realistically include based on the available data – and that data includes a few caveats below. Just for grins, let’s consider what a “stock market Mount Rushmore” might look like. There really was no stock market to speak of during the Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln administrations, and Teddy Roosevelt ranks as one of the worst-performing presidents of the past 130 years – at least as far as Wall Street is concerned. Mount Rushmore features massive 60-foot-tall busts of celebrated presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, each chosen for their respective roles in preserving or expanding the Republic.īut if you were to make a Mount Rushmore for presidents based on stock market performance, none of these men would make the cut.