Just for the heck of it, I decided to play a little presidential game. We hear far too often which party or candidate is good for this issue or the other. Let’s look over the past 100 years, and see who has been “good” for the stock market. I managed to dig up the historical price data for the Dow Jones Industrials Average and figured out how the market did on each president’s watch. Here are the results:

Since the great depression, Carter and Nixon are by far the two worst presidents when it comes to guiding the market, with George W Bush and LBJ running closely behind. Reagan and Clinton were by far the best. What’s interesting to note is that Clinton and Reagan had two very different economic plans. Regan increased defense spending tremendously and tried supply side economics to spur growth. Clinton took a very laissez-faire approach to the technological boom, declining to regulate or interfere in any way. (Think sales tax on internet purchases and how many other people would have handled that issue).

These numbers should probably also be taken with a grain of salt. From the numbers alone it looks like Calvin Coolidge had the highest growth in only 6 years time (compared with 8 for Clinton and Reagan), but the over exuberant growth under his administration is what led to the massive crash in 1929.

Jim Caple makes a very good point on McGwire, who really should be in the hall of fame:

And speaking of [Gaylord] Perry, funny how writers won’t vote for Mark McGwire despite no actual proof he took steroids (which were not specifically banned by baseball at the time) but didn’t have a problem voting in Perry despite his own admittance to cheating by throwing the spitter (which was banned four decades before Perry reached the majors). Perhaps writers should make it clear just which forms of cheating warrant inclusion in the Hall of Fame and which warrant exclusion, ridicule, dishonor and sanctimonious moralizing.