(again)Which Party Is Better for Stocks?

by Jeremy Siegel, Ph.D.

However, a closer look tells a far different story. Over that same 120 year period, the average annual stock market return has totaled only 8.25% under Republican rule, while it has returned 10.85% with Democrats in power.

Over the past 60 years, this trend has been more pronounced. The Democrats have held the presidency only 41% of that time, but under their rule the average annual return has been 15.26%, more than six percentage points higher than the 9.01% return under Republicans.

Returns during the last two administrations support these conclusions. The return on the market under the Clinton administration (1992-2000) was 19% per year, the highest of any president since Calvin Coolidge led the country in the mid 1920s.

On the contrary, the real return so far under G.W. Bush has been a measly 0.22%, and an even worse minus 2.69% return once inflation is subtracted. This return is the second worst of the postwar period, exceeded only by the negative 7% real return under the Nixon administration. In fact the Nixon and Bush Republican administrations were the only two periods since The Great Depression when shareholders suffered after-inflation losses in the stock market.

The stock market under Democrat Franklin Roosevelt, who was much despised by Republicans and other free-marketers during his record 13-year hold on the presidency, actually did well. Stocks experienced real returns of nearly 9% a year from 1932 to 1945, considerably above the 6.5% average real returns on the market. Returns under Roosevelt were good since he became president when stock prices were low and the US was wrapping up its victory in World War II when Roosevelt suddenly died.

http://finance.yahoo.com/expert/article/futureinvest/104492

Jeremy Siegel, currently the Russell E. Palmer Professor of Finance at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, has written and lectured extensively about the economy and financial markets.

Siegel graduated from Columbia University in 1967, received his Ph.D. in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1971, and spent one year as a National Science Foundation Post-Doctoral Fellow at Harvard University.
http://finance.yahoo.com/expert/bio/futureinvest/jeremy-siegel

and suggests a republican president would be good, but I disagree with him there.


The Democratic President plus the Democratic Congress is still better than the split of Dem Congress/Repub president.

I love how people try to say that there is no causation too.

That way you can forget about it.