Markets
What the S&P 500 did around his documented actions — the data, not a causal claim.
Standing rule: no scores. Color marks whether something is in force, reversed, contested, concluded, or permanent, not good or bad.
- Color is a legal fact, not an opinion. It shows (whether something is still in force, was reversed, or is contested in court), never whether it was good or bad.
- Click a figure that has an entry to see the documents and how strongly the number can be tied to the action (). A few macro counts (gross debt, this-term jobs, this-term judges) have no matching entry, so they stay unlinked rather than pointed at the wrong document.
- Nothing here is scored, graded, or ranked. When two credible sources disagree, this archive shows both numbers instead of picking one.
- Wins are in here too. See or filter the Ledger by .
- Nobody is asking you to trust a byline. There isn’t one — the archive is anonymous, on purpose, which is exactly why it has to be checkable without one. See and check one entry against its own source yourself.
The line is the daily close — a broad measure of the US stock market. The dashed markers are dated actions. What the archive does not do is claim an action caused a move: markets move on many things at once, and a single day rarely has a single cause. Change the window below and watch the same action’s number change — that is exactly why a percentage alone proves nothing. The archive shows you the two dated facts and lets you judge the rest.
S&P 500 and dated actions, 2016–2026
Every marked action, at the selected window
| Date | Action | S&P 500, 3d |
|---|---|---|
| January 23, 2017 | Executive order withdrawing from the Trans-Pacific Partnership | +1.4% |
| December 22, 2017 | Tax Cuts and Jobs Act signed into law | +0.2% |
| March 8, 2018 | Section 232 steel and aluminum tariffs proclaimed | +1% |
| July 19, 2018 | Public pressure on the Federal Reserve over interest rates | +0.6% |
| January 15, 2020 | Phase One China trade agreement signed | +1% |
| March 13, 2020 | COVID-19 national emergency declared | -11.5% |
| January 6, 2021 | Certification of the 2020 election interrupted at the Capitol | +1.4% |
| May 30, 2024 | New York jury verdict on falsifying business records | +1.1% |
| January 20, 2025 | Executive order creating the federal workforce reduction effort | +0.9% |
| February 7, 2025 | IEEPA duties on Canadian, Mexican and Chinese imports published | +0.4% |
| April 2, 2025 | IEEPA “reciprocal” tariffs announced (after market close) | -10.7% |
| April 9, 2025 | 90-day pause on most “reciprocal” tariffs announced | -0.9% |
| June 9, 2025 | Steel and aluminum tariffs raised from 25% to 50% | +0.7% |
| July 4, 2025 | One Big Beautiful Bill Act signed into law | +0.8% |
| August 25, 2025 | Announced attempt to remove a Federal Reserve governor | +1% |
| October 1, 2025 | Federal government shutdown begins | +0.4% |
| February 20, 2026 | Supreme Court holds that IEEPA does not authorise tariffs | +0.5% |
| February 28, 2026 | Start of the 2026 Iran conflict | -0.7% |
Data is daily close from the S&P Dow Jones Indices, via FRED (Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis), not intraday. Tying a move to the minute of a statement would need tick data the archive does not have, and would be a causal claim it does not make. FRED publishes this series under a licence that keeps only the most recent ten years, so it cannot reach further back than that and the earliest dates shown move forward over time. The chart draws a reduced sample of the 2,514 closes in the series, keeping each marked action’s own trading day exactly; the percentages come from the full series.
The same index across every term it covers, 1971–2026
Presidents do not control stock markets. Interest rates, global demand, technology cycles, wars and shocks do most of the work, and a president inherits an economy already moving. Every figure below would be in the ledger — it happened during the term, and nothing more than that is claimed. The rows are in date order and only date order. Ranking them would turn a set of dated facts into a league table, which is the kind of scoring this archive does not publish.
Change in the index during each term, in date order
| Term | Window | Change during the term | Sessions |
|---|---|---|---|
| Richard Nixonpartial | January 22, 1973 – August 8, 1974 | -46.9% | 390 |
| Gerald Fordpartial | August 9, 1974 – January 19, 1977 | +38% | 618 |
| Jimmy Carter | January 20, 1977 – January 19, 1981 | +107.6% | 1,008 |
| Ronald Reagan, first term | January 20, 1981 – January 18, 1985 | +32.4% | 1,012 |
| Ronald Reagan, second term | January 21, 1985 – January 19, 1989 | +46.8% | 1,010 |
| George H. W. Bush | January 20, 1989 – January 19, 1993 | +77.9% | 1,010 |
| Bill Clinton, first term | January 20, 1993 – January 17, 1997 | +93.4% | 1,010 |
| Bill Clinton, second term | January 20, 1997 – January 19, 2001 | +103.1% | 1,009 |
| George W. Bush, first term | January 22, 2001 – January 19, 2005 | -24.8% | 1,002 |
| George W. Bush, second term | January 20, 2005 – January 16, 2009 | -25.2% | 1,005 |
| Barack Obama, first term | January 20, 2009 – January 18, 2013 | +117.6% | 1,007 |
| Barack Obama, second term | January 22, 2013 – January 19, 2017 | +76.3% | 1,006 |
| Donald Trump, first term | January 20, 2017 – January 19, 2021 | +137.6% | 1,006 |
| Joe Biden | January 20, 2021 – January 17, 2025 | +45.9% | 1,004 |
| Donald Trump, second termpartial | January 21, 2025 – September 25, 2026 | +37% | 422 |
Why this section uses a different index from the one above: The NASDAQ Composite is weighted toward technology companies, so it is not a measure of the whole economy. It is used for the long comparison because it is the only free daily index series that reaches back far enough; the broad-market alternatives are either capped at ten years or no longer published. The chart draws a reduced sample of the 14,028 daily closes so the page stays light, but every percentage in the table is computed from the full series, and each term’s first trading day is kept exactly as it is so a marker sits on the real close. A hatched bar is a window that is not a completed four-year term.