There’s been a lot of talk about the so-called “Trump Rally”—the surge in stock prices in reaction to Donald Trump winning the election—but famed stock analyst Jeremy Siegel is buying none of it.
The author of “Stocks for the Long Run” said the media and the talking heads of Wall Street have it all wrong: It’s not Trump that catapulted the S&P 500 to new heights. It’s the Republican Party.
“The market likes the Republican agenda,” Siegel said during a presentation with economist Robert Shiller at the CFA Institute Annual Conference in Philadelphia on Monday. “It’s not that they like the Trump agenda.”
Siegel acknowledged that there are probably “intersections” where the Trump and GOP agendas meet, but he said some aspects of Trump’s platform—his proposed trade restrictions, for one—are clearly not popular on Wall Street.
What is dear to the hearts of Wall Street investors, Siegel said, is a Republican Party that’s in control of the presidency and Congress.
“Trump became a way that the Republican agenda could be adopted into law,” he said.
The talk came at a time of obvious troubles for Trump. A special counsel was recently appointed to investigate the possible ties between his campaign and Russia’s meddling into the U.S. elections. Scrutiny has also intensified over Trump’s motivations for firing former FBI director James Comey.
The president’s predicament was not lost on the audience at the CFA conference. At one point during the Siegel/Shiller presentation, moderator Gillian Tett, U.S. managing editor at the Financial Times, asked members of the audience to raise their hands if they believed President Trump would win a second term in office. In a hall at the Pennsylvania Convention Center with 2,200 seats, most of them occupied, Tett said she could only spot three raised hands.
In Siegel’s view, however, this turmoil may not weigh the market down—at least in the short term. Trump, he noted, has at least two years to pursue the party’s agenda since the Democrats would not be able to retake the Senate or the House until 2018. That’s a lot of time, he said, pointing to the fact that President Obama implemented Obamacare and the Dodd-Frank financial reform act in his first two years in office.
“Hey, a lot can be done in two years,” Siegel said.