Fooling himself

Trump is fooling himself with the Dow

The president celebrates a meaningless metric while wage growth continues to languish.

By DANNY VINIK

President Donald Trump is proud of the U.S. stock market. He made that clear in tweets on Saturday, Monday and Tuesday. On Wednesday, as the Dow Jones Industrial Average surpassed 22,000 for the first time, he announced his support for legislation to cut legal immigration—and then quickly changed topics to crow about the market. “We've picked up, substantially now, more than $4 trillion in net worth in terms of our country, our stocks, our companies,” he declared enthusiastically.

Trump is right that the stock market is on a tear, up 22 percent since Election Day. But the stock market is not the economy, and the truth is that the economy hasn’t much changed since Trump took office. Growth remains at about 2 percent, wages are still barely rising and job gains, if anything, have slowed.

The Dow, of course, isn’t unrelated to the economy. The index of 30 large publicly traded companiesis a popular proxy for the health of America’s largest businesses. If the Dow were crashing, it would be a real sign of trouble. But economists have frequently found little relationship between returns on stock investments and real economic growth. For example, a major 2002 study, from three economists, looked at equity returns and per capita gross domestic product growth for 16 nations from 1900 to 2000 and found little evidence that stronger equity returns correlated with stronger long-run economic growth.

In the case of the Dow, this is pretty easy to understand. The 30 companies in the Dow employ more than 6 million workers, a small percentage of the 153 million people working in the United States. And since about 80 percent of the value of the stock market is held by the richest 10 percent of the nation, the vast majority of gains in share value accrue to the rich, not to most Americans.

Financial experts and most policymakers are normally hesitant to celebrate a rising stock market. During Barack Obama’s eight years in office, the Dow rose 140 percent, a result of him taking over during the depths of the Great Recession. But despite the huge growth in the Dow and the recovery from the recession, few, if any, economists would say the economy was strong under Obama. Economic growth fluctuated around 2 percent, and wages only inched forward. Voters’ anger over the economy was clear with the election of Trump.

Trump would have trouble replicating Obama’s stock market record if he tried: That would require the Dow to hit nearly 50,000 by 2025. His voters would be better served if he tried to build on the economic gains to spur stronger wage growth and full employment, while addressing structural challenges like weak productivity growth and declining labor force participation. These are hard issues, and they won’t be solved overnight—or in six months. They might not even show up in the Dow: stronger wage growth, for instance, hurts companies’ bottom lines.

How’s Trump doing on those more important measures so far? Nothing much has really changed. The president has been touting second-quarter GDP growth, which came in at 2.6 percent. “We have a growth rate which has been much higher than, as you know, anybody anticipated, except maybe us,” he said Wednesday. The last time quarterly economic growth reached that level? The third quarter of 2016.

Employment growth has slowed too. In the first six months of the year, the economy added 863,000 jobs, down from 955,000 in the same period last year. In the first half of 2014, the economy gained 1.3 million jobs. As for wage growth, it’s still muted: Average hourly earnings have risen just 2.5 percent over the past year.

These figures aren’t Trump’s fault. Presidents have limited influence over the economy in normal political times, when Congress is actually functioning. In an era of legislative gridlock, the federal government’s influence over the economy is further diminished. But Trump isn’t acting that way. He’s treating the Dow’s record as a kind of endorsement—a signal that the economy has improved significantly since Jan. 20. That simply isn’t the case. A booming Dow is great news for the wealthy investors who hold the vast majority of their investments in the stock market, but if Trump has convinced himself it’s the same thing as a surging economy under his leadership, he might be surprised when Republicans face a lot of angry voters next November.