Given President Marcos just celebrated his 100th day in office, I thought it might be interesting to do a little comparison of how the PSE fared during the first 100 days of each of our last three presidents. Thanks to Raymund for writing in with this idea! We measured a baseline for each President, which was the PSE on January 1st of the year he was elected, then we measured the PSE on the day after his inauguration, and on the 100th day of his presidency.
Check out the table below:
MB BOTTOM-LINE
We should be careful about jumping to conclusions with things like this, so please remember that this analysis is just for fun.
A president’s ability to impact the stock market is usually fairly indirect, except in the cases where Duterte attempted to interfere directly with the existence and control of some specific, publicly-traded companies, like PhilWeb, Manila Water, and ABS-CBN, but none of those misadventures happened until much later in his presidency.
Getting into it, it’s clear that Aquino had the best “First 100”, with a staggering 24% improvement in the PSE.
Marcos and Duterte tied with 7% drop in their 1st 100 days, but while the PSE lost 7% during the time between Duterte’s inauguration and his 100th day, at least the PSE was still net positive during that time.
The same cannot be said for Marcos, who has (so far) presided over one of the more depressing stretches of PSE performance that we’ve seen since the early days of the COVID pandemic.
The exchange had fallen 12% from the start of the year until the time Marcos was inaugurated, and continued falling to be down over 18% on Marcos’s 100th day.
Again, there’s no value in drawing direct lines of comparison based on these fun numbers.
It’s not like Marcos caused the global inflationary crisis that has devastated the market.
It’s not like Aquino’s personal touches amped the market up nearly 50% by the end of his first 100 days. These are just the raw numbers!
--