Going into 2023, Donald Trump clearly thought he had a winning theme in stocks.
A regular part of his message has been to claim that President Biden is market poison, with the former president harshly comparing the poor 2022 to the Great Depression of 1929.
“Does anyone have a 401(k)?” Raise your hand if you’re happy with this,” he asked a crowd in Davenport, Iowa, in March. “They were happy when I ruled this country,” he added.
Since then, however, the market has been on the rise: The Dow Jones Industrial Average (^DJI) hit a new all-time record in December and the S&P 500 (^GSPC) is now on the verge of a similar milestone.
Where markets almost certainly ended the year, the ups and downs in stocks will be a regular part of the election campaign in 2024, which is widely expected to see a rematch between Biden and Trump.
As for Trump, recent highs have forced a candidate who likes to tout highs into the unusual role of market minimizer.
“The stock market makes rich people richer,” Trump said disapprovingly to a crowd in Durham, New Hampshire, on December 16, before quickly moving on to other topics.
He made similar comments the next day in Reno, Nevada. He didn't ask for a show of hands, but instead claimed: “Biden's inflation catastrophe is wiping out your savings and shattering your dreams.”
The speeches from the former president, who shuttles between states with early voting, have largely focused on issues such as inflation and claimed that the multitude of criminal charges against him – 91 felonies in four separate cases – were politically motivated.
For the president, the market highs presented an opportunity for his campaign to troll Trump's prediction that markets would collapse under Biden.
“Well done, Donald,” Biden posted on
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Biden. Of course, he faces a bigger challenge with voters who gave him historically weak economic numbers.
The sense of economic uncertainty has plagued his re-election campaign, lowering his overall approval rating and leading many to conclude he could be the underdog against Trump in 2024.
Meanwhile, Biden advisers say they see some signs of improvement in his economic assessment as consumer sentiment improves and inflation pressures ease.
A sharp turnaround since Trump's term in office
In markets, the way Trump spoke about the issue toward the end of 2023 was even more heated compared to his time in office.
In his messages from the Oval Office from 2017 to 2021, the then-president almost never let a stock market high pass without an effusive comment. “I will never get tired of telling you this – and we will never get tired of winning!” he wrote in 2019 in one of countless examples.
As market gains continued this year, Trump talked less and less about the stock market in his speeches, according to a Yahoo Finance analysis of the year's transcripts.
But he still turned to the topic occasionally to promote his successes.
Republican presidential candidate former U.S. President Donald Trump claps during a campaign rally at the Whittemore Center Arena on December 16, 2023 in Durham, New Hampshire. (Photo by Scott Eisen/Getty Images) (Scott Eisen via Getty Images)
“When we left, our stock market was higher than it was right before Corona,” he said at the Florida Freedom Summit on Nov. 4, adding, “Nobody thought something like this would be possible.”
But the market has been booming and gaining every week since that speech in Florida, and the former president apparently hasn't been bragging as much lately.
All in all, 2023 ended with the Dow up 13.7% for the year. The S&P is up over 24%, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq composite is up 43.4%.
Of course, no one knows where the market will go in 2024 — and whether the daily ups and downs will change American perceptions of Biden and Trump's economic records — but the market move appears to be accompanied by plenty of commentary from both candidates.
Ben Werschkul is a Washington correspondent for Yahoo Finance.
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