Although Election Day was about nine months ago, the stock market is essentially still celebrating Hillary Clinton’s loss.
Charles Gasparino, a Fox Business senior correspondent, contends that the stock market continues to hit record highs seemingly on a daily basis and is ignoring any political chaos in Washington, D.C.
“For all the Trumpian hysterics of the last six-plus months, the fact that Hillary Clinton isn’t president is good for stocks,” he wrote for the New York Post.
“Most members of the media don’t want to admit what honest sophisticated investors will,” Gasparino said in his explanation to the president. “That you’re better for stocks and the economy than your vanquished opponent,” Gasparino wrote.
“With Hillary Clinton sidelined, there’s no rush to expand the government takeover of health care. With President Trump in the White House, the war on coal and the hesitance to open domestic oil drilling are both over, which means lower energy prices and better economic growth,” Gasparino wrote.
“Again, even if we don’t get the yuuge corporate and individual tax cuts Trump promised, we’re not getting the huge tax increases on individuals and businesses that Clinton ran on. And who knows, with a little luck, we might, just might, see corporate taxes fall modestly from their federal level of 35 percent — which is one of the world’s highest — to something that helps us compete globally and keeps companies from relocating overseas,” Gasparino wrote.
“Maybe the biggest place where Trump wins hands down is in regulation. Talk to as many CEOs as I do and they will tell you holding the line or reducing regulations — whether it’s absurdly stringent EPA standards or some of the complex and costly rules in Obama’s Dodd Frank financial-reform law — has a distinctly positive bottom-line impact on their earnings,” Gasparino said.
“Trump has gotten little if any kudos for actually using some of his power as the country’s chief executive to roll back many regulations tying the hands of manufacturers and ending the dopey Obama-era obsession with costly green energy. CEOs say that simply by not creating more regulations, combined with plans to reform laws that prevent banks from lending more, like Dodd Frank, the Trump administration is boosting businesses’ confidence. That translates into increased business activity and, yes, higher stock prices.”
To be sure, the Dow Jones industrial average peaked above the 22,000 mark Wednesday for the first time on Wednesday, powered by Apple's healthy quarterly iPhone sales.
The Dow has risen 11 percent in 2017 and in on track for its sixth straight record close, even as Wall Street loses confidence that Trump and a Republican-controlled Congress will be able to cut taxes and increase infrastructure spending this year, Reuters reported.
The Dow hit the 20,000 mark in late January and crossed the 21,000 mark in just over a month on March 1.
However, some market experts aren't optimistic the stock rally will continue.
For his part, money manager Neil Hennessy is warning savvy investors to prepare for a “severe downdraft” which could push stocks down 5 percent to 10 percent.
"What the investors are now going into is passive investing,” Hennessy, chief investment officer at Hennessy Funds, told CNBC.
“They're going into these index ETFs. And, the indexes, BlackRock and Vanguard and you name it, they all own the same companies in the same percentage. If something should scare the investor and they want to sell, everybody is going to have to sell at the same time. They're going to be selling the same stocks," he said.
"You gotta be prepared so you don't get — for lack of a better word — freaked out," he added.
(Newsmax wires services contributed to this report).
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