Recent headlines would understandably make a casual or low-information reader continue to buy into the legacy media’s gigantic lie that everything about Donald Trump is nightmarish and everything about Joe Biden is utopian.
From the Washington Post: “Dow Climbs 1,100 points as vaccine news, Biden victory rev up markets.”
From the UK’s Guardian: “Biden win boosts global stock markets as FTSE 100 surges.”
From Bloomberg: “JP Morgan Says Biden Victory Could Mark a Stock Market Shift.”
From RealClearPolitics: “The Stock Market Likes Joe Biden.”
From Morningstar: "Dow Surges to Highest Level Since February On Vaccine Results, Biden Win."
None of this should be construed as an argument or complaint against rising stock prices; rising stocks are outstanding. It is simply an illustration of blatant media bias. In reality, it would seem that a confluence of several factors are contributing to the overall market surge in the past few sessions.
For starters, Monday featured a meteoric rise of 1,500 points based primarily off news from Pfizer and a German company that “their vaccine candidate was more than 90 percent effective, compared with a placebo.” Apparently the insidious cartel known as 'Big Pharma' is tolerable again to Democrats.
It all begs another obvious question: Who was presiding over the country and its pharmaceutical industry during the pandemic outbreak? Here’s a hint: Not Joe Biden. Of course, Mike Pence correctly called out Team Biden/Harris at his vice presidential debate when any iteration of a cohesive plan toward battling the virus looked “a little bit like plagiarism, which is something Joe Biden knows a little bit about.” According to the CDC, the average time for a vaccine to undergo proper development is listed in years or decades, not months.
The stock market is also enjoying a revival for the obvious reason that uncertainty is an investment killer. The election tallies increasingly point to a Joe Biden ascension to the Oval Office; this “addition to increased political clarity after the Nov. 3 vote” makes a marked difference in investor confidence, as Bloomberg News reported. Again, is it because Joe Biden was elected, or is it because the vote tally is pointing toward a single winner, who happens to be Biden? At any rate, markets tend to perform better when an incumbent is reelected compared to an incoming president (by a margin of 6.5% to 5%), so any gains under a Biden victory would be historically and statistically smaller than a Trump one.
There is also the significant reality - and this is the single most crucial element to the headlines - that Joe Biden will, in all likelihood, enter office with an opposition-led Senate. This is what many investors call the “goldilocks outcome.” The Washington Post ran with a headline directly attributing Biden for the market victory, spent the remaining word count reviewing the pending inoculative breakthroughs, and concluded only in its final paragraph that “stocks soared...as the prospect of a GOP-controlled Senate reduced the likelihood that a Biden presidency would usher in tax increases and sweeping regulatory changes.” Indeed, the Guardian also noted that “while lots of attention was given to Trump v Biden, markets have reacted strongly to the likely split Congress." As one investor relayed to Morningstar: "...the bits the market was worried about [because of a Biden presidency] - higher taxes and more regulation - will not happen...That's what's been driving the market higher."
Translation: Stocks did not rise because of Biden; they soared because of the Republican gridlock that will prevent Biden from enacting insane leftist policies. The notion that a GOP congressional bulwark can provide a hindrance to Democrats’ fiscal illiteracy, and thus propelling the stock market higher, seems to be in exact conflict with the leading headlines.
Finally, although Democrats have denied it for four years, Donald Trump is still the president, and he continues to lead the country through a phenomenal DJIA trajectory. In his first three years, the DJIA increased by over 33%, a result of reducing regulatory constraints and allowing the stock market to take off from around 21,000 to over 28,000. This, despite economic experts predicting worse financial outcomes than Chicken Little if he were to be elected. There should be no doubt remaining that any leftist claiming expertise in economics, climatology, epidemiology, journalism, polling, and generally speaking, any other field should be heeded with the same intellectual regard as an infant cooing at her parents.
Does Biden deserve credit for the stock market? Maybe. Does he deserve all of it? Only if you believe that he doesn’t have dementia, either.
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