Donald Trump has claimed several times this year that the US stock market would be 5,000 to 10,000 points higher if the Federal Reserve hadn’t raised interest rates four times in 2018.
Trump officially starts his 2020 campaign on Tuesday with a rally in Orlando, Florida, and appears to be road-testing some of the themes he’ll be touching on in the next 18 months, including stoking fear of a market meltdown.The president has claimed several times this year and as recently as Friday in a “Fox & Friends” interview that the US stock market would be 5,000 to 10,000 points higher if the Federal Reserve hadn’t raised interest rates four times in 2018.
Research by Macrotrends shows the Dow Jones Industrial Average’s performance so far in Trump’s term has been middling compared with his predecessors, and trails the gains made under Democrats Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. The benchmark S&P 500 index made a record high in early May before slipping in the face of Trump’s stepped-up trade war with China.