NEW YORK — Next year will be a year unlike any other for the stock market.
The Republican takeover of the House of Representatives on Tuesday means Wall Street will be contending with three situations in 2011 that drive stock prices:
• The year before a president faces re-election.
• The year after a president has lost control of Congress.
• The second year of a fragile economic expansion.
The market often behaves a certain way in each of those situations, but history isn’t helpful now because investors have never faced this trifecta before. What’s clear is that what happens in Washington will be watched even more closely by investors next year.
“This election is more important than the average one because of all of the economic and policy issues that remain uncertain,” said Robert Doll, chief investment strategist at BlackRock, an investing firm with $3.4 trillion in assets under management.
Any mishandling of the economy by politicians will mean that “the fragile economic recovery we have is going to be hit over the head, and we would have to think about a double-dip recession all over again,” Doll said.
Since 1945, the Dow Jones industrial average has gained an average of 19 percent the year before a sitting president runs. That’s more than double the 7.9 percent average annual gain during the same period.
One theory is that the president pushes through politically popular spending measures to help his re-election. But that doesn’t explain why the market also tends to rise in the third year of a president’s second term. The Dow rose 25.2 percent, for example, in 1999, the third year of President Bill Clinton’s second term.
Since 1902, the Dow has gained, on average, 13.7 percent in the third year of a president’s first term and 10.9 percent in the third year of a president’s second term. In the year after a president loses control of Congress, stock returns haven’t followed a pattern in the following year. The Dow plunged 53 percent in 1931 and gained 34 percent in 1995. Gains in the other three years ranged from 2.2 percent to 20.8 percent.
The economy is growing at a 2 percent annual rate, the Commerce Department estimates. That’s slow by historical standards and shows that the recession’s end 17 months ago hasn’t translated into a robust economic expansion.
“There’s no way to tell what’s going to happen, or we would all be rich,” said Paul Larson, chief equities strategist at Morningstar.
