Sunday, January 27, 2013

The S&P500 Is Up 12.31% Per Year In Obama's First Term

You can use the tool which generated this graphic here, anytime you want for anytime you want.

I measure November on November because elections mark the turning point psychologically, which counts for more than anything imho.

Elites have benefitted handsomely under Obama, which is what you would expect from a fascist. If that's too harsh for you, supply "national socialist" or "corporatist".

I reported in September, here, that stock market performance under Obama is the 4th best since Harry Truman, based on incomplete data showing inflation adjusted returns to date. Now that it's the new year, the data is in, but the conclusion is the same. Even though he slips from 12.66% to 12.31% for per annum returns, he's still safely in 4th place behind Truman, Clinton and Eisenhower.

Free market capitalism isn't practised in the United States and hasn't been since at least Woodrow Wilson. The corporatist model in the United States is mediated primarily through banking and the institution known as the Federal Reserve, which attempts to manipulate the economy through control of money, lending and interest rates, rewarding those first in line the most, the bankers, and leaving a few crumbs for the rest of us in a descending pecking order: corporations, unions, insurance companies, etc.  To a lesser extent, the tax code is used to reward friends and punish enemies, which is why it has grown so enormous in size and complicated to follow. The fascists' biggest coup in recent years was the tax reform of 1997 and the banking deregulation of 1999, both under Clinton and Gingrich, which unleashed a torrent of capital stored in decades of the housing stock from which elites skimmed and got very rich. You know it as the housing bubble, the result of the bursting of which has been 5 million homes repossessed and massive unemployment on a scale not scene since FDR. As a socialist, Obama is entirely happy with this arrangement because it offers him political opportunities. Idealism is merely a tool. He uses it to get power and get rich. And like dopes, Americans continue to hand it over, election after election. And some of these prisoners even grow to love their jailers.