With the U.S. presidential election just two weeks away, Deutsche Bank Research found the S&P 500 has seen a long stretch of annualized double-digit returns under different White House administrations — with two exceptions since 1933.
“As we approach the big day, markets are bracing themselves for a vote that will likely lead to very different policies, depending who wins and with what congressional configuration,” said Jim Reid, global head of macro and thematic research at Deutsche Bank, in a note emailed Tuesday.
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Yet it may be “better to be lucky than good,” said Reid, explaining that events might be more likely “to dictate big-picture market performance under the next president, with policy probably playing a smaller role.”
Deutsche Bank Research broke out the S&P 500’s SPX annualized total return under each U.S. president dating back to Theodore Roosevelt in 1901. The chart below shows the S&P 500 fell on an annualized basis under Herbert Hoover and Richard Nixon — declines that stood out against an otherwise long period of double-digit total returns no matter who was in the White House. The S&P 500 also fell on an annualized basis under President George W. Bush’s administration, the chart shows.
“From 1933 onwards, most presidents have benefited from a long period of U.S. exceptionalism and double-digit annual equity returns with just two very unlucky exceptions,” said Reid. “The problem is these exceptions have tended to be pretty savage relative to the norm.”
But in Reid’s view, “the big outliers were driven by events that were arguably mostly outside of the control of the sitting president.” Those events include the Great Depression, “the 1973 oil shock, and the double whammy of the post-2000 bubble unwind” and the early global financial crisis seen under George W. Bush, according to the note.
“Academics have argued that Hoover’s policies exacerbated the Depression,” said Reid, referring to the president who served from 1929 to 1933. “But you only have to look at the returns under” the preceding administration of Calvin Coolidge “to see that he likely presided over a bubble that contributed to the subsequent 1929 crash, even if he had left office earlier that year.”