Originally published at Bloomberg.com | January 22, 2018
The first year of Donald Trump’s presidency was marked by some of the worst political turbulence in modern U.S. history. But when it comes to the economy and markets, the surprise is how little change, good or bad, has occurred.
Let’s start with economics. The prevailing view is that conditions have improved over the past year. I’ve compared the performance of some indicators during Trump’s first year to the averages for President Barack Obama’s first and second terms.
Based on official data through the third quarter of 2017, augmented by consensus estimates for the fourth quarter, the U.S. economy grew at an annual rate of 2.3 percent from a year earlier. That is a smidgen above the annual average growth rate of Obama’s second term (2.2 percent), which itself was a significant improvement from the 0.9 percent average rate in his first term, when the economy was dragged down in its first year by the deepest recession of the postwar era. Continue Reading