With the boffo jobs report for February, I expected President Trump’s grade to improve when we plugged the latest numbers into the Yahoo Finance Trumponomics Report Card.
But Trump’s grade fell by one notch, from B+ to B. What happened?
Here’s what: Trump’s ranking fell on three of our six indicators—exports, stock prices and earnings growth—while on jobs, it stayed where it is. Each month, we use data provided by Moody’s Analytics to compare the economy under Trump with its performance under six prior presidents at the same point in their terms. So it’s not purely a measurement of how the economy is doing. Rather, it’s a measure of how the Trump economy is doing compared with the Obama economy, the Bush economy, and so on, back to Richard Nixon in the 1970s. (Here’s our complete methodology.)
Here’s how Trump ranks on the latest report card:
On job growth, the Trump economy ranks third out of seven presidents, after Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter. Trump has ranked third on that measure for 9 months out of 11, since we rolled out the report card last May. While the latest employment report was sizzling, with 313,000 new jobs created in February, the economy created even more jobs during the first 13 months of the Clinton and Carter presidencies.
On exports, Trump fell by one notch, and now ranks second out of four presidents (that data only goes back to 1993). On stock prices, Trump now ranks third, down from second last month. That reflects a 5.1% decline in the S&P 500 stock index in February.