While the economic surge in activity that seems to have started building since the election? Yeah, I'm sure you'll be more than happy to give those positives to Obama. Rather than crediting the looming end of Obama's/Democratic economic policies as being the trigger.
What surge in economic activity? The stock market has taken off, but employment has increased every month since the early days of Obama's Administration. I'm sure a more generous observer would say that has had an impact on the economy, but Trump (or maybe even Romney) will take credit for any further increases and blame any job losses on Obama.
Consumer Confidence is polling at the highest levels seen since 2001. The Real Estate market, which had been slowing considerably in the run up to the November Election is showing signs of having taken a rather significant upturn since about the middle of November, in particular housing in the upper income brackets.
Another way to view this is the rhetoric and psychology side of markets in particular where those markets meet politics. With Trump, its okay to be rich, or to become rich, and it certainly is OK to make money.
Under Obama, if you're rich, or you become rich, your success came on the backs of others("You didn't build that."). You're going to be accused of exploitation and a long list of other things as well more likely than not. You'll be threatened with new regulations and laws if your "too successful" and possibly new taxes as well. After all, if you're doing so well, you should be able to afford to pay more and "spread the wealth around."
It's been an argument I know I made elsewhere back in 2012 in regards to Romney, I don't recall if I had access to my Ornery account at that time. Even in 2012, business was sitting on giant boatloads worth of (cash, "liquid") capital
and doing (essentially) nothing with it besides keep it on their balance sheets. Record amounts of it even. That is a rather unusual situation to find many/most corporations in, they don't make money by leaving their money parked in bank accounts. Which means "corporate America" was highly uncertain about something(s) in regards to the American Economy. It was suspected that in the event of a Romney win, that money would be unleashed, but if Obama won, the status quo would hold.
Well, Obama won, and the status quo held. 4 years later, and "Corporate America" is now sitting on top of an even larger horde of cash. Much of the growth that has happened in many companies over the past 8 years hasn't really been the outcome of new initiatives on their part, but rather by their instead using those large war chests to buy out other smaller "start up" companies with either promising, or already demonstrated business opportunities.
Obama presided over an 8 year long "merger and consolidation" business cycle.
Which is very, VERY, abnormally long so far as business cycles go.
Something was preventing the economy from moving back into an actual growth phase. Then suddenly, lo and behold, a Republican is voted into the highest office, and things seem to suddenly start heating up even before they're actually in office...
Amazon is already reporting one of its strongest holiday sales years to date. Many other retailers are looking to have done very well as well(Which would track with high consumer confidence). So economic indicators are heading up, we'll see what really happens once the rubber hits the road in January, but it seems people are liking their prospects.
But getting back to:
The stock market has taken off, but employment has increased every month since the early days of Obama's Administration.
As the Media, and the Democrats would gleefully say in 2004, and again in 2008: What increase? What recovery? You mean the growing GDP figure that failed to even keep pace with population growth, never mind inflation?
The Employment numbers that also likewise failed to track with population growth where we had more people entering the workforce in almost any given month than we had new jobs created for? I guess it's a good thing a lot of other people decided to withdraw from the job force for the long-term, helping move the unemployment numbers lower?
Also what about that whole underemployment number? They couldn't stop talking about it under Bush. Under Obama, the only people who seemed to be bothered with bringing it up were right-wing pundits. But rest assured, now that Trump is about to enter office, those "underemployment" numbers will be getting attention, as will the "labor force participation rate" (as dubious as that number now is, given the retiring baby boomers), and any other economic indicator they can use to say that economic misery isn't improving, or possibly getting worse under Trump.
Although I'll generally hold that we're moving out of an 8 year merger and consolidation phase of economic activity, so we're probably poised to see an economic boom/growth phase that is unprecedented. The concern there is people are going to forget what "primed the pump" for it to happen(8 years of an artificially suppressed/manipulated market), and we're likely to set ourselves up for one hell of a bust.. Which invariably follows a boom.
But it's probably going to take
years, not months, to play itself out. Probably long enough for Trump to get re-elected on "it's the economy stupid" before it finally runs out of steam.
In the mean time, it will be fun to watch the Democrats scream though.
