The Presidency As A Stock

My son sent me an interesting chart displaying the approval rates of each president since Truman and asked what it might look if one of the major market indexes were overlaid on it.

One of the most interesting and noteworthy aspects of the table is that the only President who left office with higher ratings than when he entered was Clinton. Go figure? With all that he went through during his second term!

Couldn’t overlay a market index but did convert the data into another chart. If the Presidency were a stock, we would have lost a lot of money on it over the half a century.

But the Presidency seems to be bottoming out over the past three presidencies (even after including Bush 43). So there’s hope …. hum, might make a good campaign slogan, “I’m the candidate of/from hope.” Has a familiar ring to it. Perhaps the Presidency (and the U.S.) might be a buy.

(To be fair, the chart isn’t exactly correct because I just put them end to end when one going out at 35% approval handed the baton to someone starting at 70%. But then it wouldn’t be as interesting.)

So let’s keep our fingers crossed that Obama can get this stock moving up. He’s starting with a very high approval rating so he’d have to be the equivalent of a messiah to be able to cause this chart to actually complete the turnaround process. Good luck, Barack.

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