By John William Templeton, Publisher
WALL STREET — I’m on Wall Street this morning, remembering October 2008 when the Dow Jones average had fallen 30 percent during the year, causing the collapse of Bear Stearns and a huge bailout of banks who had issued predatory loans to African-American households.
I took the extraordinary position of writing in the securities industry bible The New York Society of Securities Analysts and predicting that the first Black president would create a stock market boom. My street cred came from a 2003 interview in the San Jose Mercury News when I predicted the collapse as the result of the tax and budget policies of the Bush administration.
In October 2008, the Dow was at 10,000. Eight years later, the Dow rose to 19,000 at the end of the two terms of Barack Obama.
Unfortunately, there was a return to the trickle down policies in 2017 and as has been the case since Herbert Hoover, every Republican president has suffered a recession because of the allegiance to those failed doctines.
The Biden-Harris administration has achieved a similar 10,000 gain in the Dow from 30,000 in 2021 at the depths of the COVID shutdown, to 40,000 now.
It took 230 years for the Dow, a measure of a stock market that originally began as slave trading market on cobblestones laid by African-Americans, to reach 1,000. I remember that as editor of the San Jose Business Journal in 1987 when the market crashed.
The greatest creation of wealth in world history has happened since then. Contrary to the stereotypes, half of the current stock market value has occurred with African-Americans in the White House.
I would argue that an additional third from 2016 to 2020 was the result of the continuation of Obama era policies such as the Affordable Care Act.