Loose Tweets Sink Truths

The Stock Market has been creating tremendous benefits for our country in the form of not only Record Setting Stock Prices, but present and future Jobs, Jobs, Jobs. Seven TRILLION dollars of value created since our big election win!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 7, 2018

Apparently Wall Street created another $1 trillion in value since Friday (which is truly amazing since it's been closed all weekend):

Dow goes from 18,589 on November 9, 2016, to 25,075 today, for a new all-time Record. Jumped 1000 points in last 5 weeks, Record fastest 1000 point move in history. This is all about the Make America Great Again agenda! Jobs, Jobs, Jobs. Six trillion dollars in value created!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 5, 2018

I went looking for the source of these numbers.  Stuart Varney claimed Trump had created $4 trillion in value as of July 20th:

Look at this: since his election win, the Trump rally has added $4.1 trillion to the nation's wealth. Anyone with a 401k, an IRA, college savings, retirement savings, mutual funds. Anyone with a dime in the market has taken a piece of that $4 trillion.

You'll note there's absolutely no basis for that claim, making it a perfectly Trumpian exclamation.  No citation to statistics, a source, a reason for the calculation, nothing.  Media Matters tells me the claim is based on the Wilshire Index, one of many that has shown stock value rising since 2009, a rise that continued into 2017.  What Trump didn't do, was stop it.  Well, no surprise there.

To put that in perspective, though, the Wilshire Index showed a gain of $2.2 trillion from November 8, 2016, to January 26, 2017.  However, by March 6, 6 weeks later, the gain was $3 trillion since the same November date.  By November 8, 2017, it was $5.4 trillion. 

Greg Valliere, chief global strategist at Horizon Investments, says outgoing Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen deserves “much of the credit” because the Fed’s policy of low interest rates has helped maintain a good economy and “favors stocks over other investments.”

Which is interesting because Trump replaced Yellen, and because the Fed has been favoring stocks over other investments.  And, of course, despite the Wilshire Index and the daily reports on the DJIA, stock market reports are not considered leading economic indicators.

But I digress....

So where does the "$7 trillion" number come from?  Trump's gift for exaggeration, obviously, as the market was closed between those two tweets.  Where did the $6 trillion number come from?  Wishful thinking perhaps, though it's not beyond the realm of possibility the total market value has risen by $0.6 trillion since early November.

The President lies so regularly you can't really trust him to tell you his own name.