Elections have less impact on your 401(k) than you might think

[October 03, 2024]  By STAN CHOE

NEW YORK (AP) — Much like those annoying political TV ads, the warnings come back every four years: All the uncertainty around the U.S. presidential election could have big consequences for your 401(k)!

Such warnings can raise anxiety, but remember: If your 401(k) is like many retirement savers’, with most invested in funds that track the S&P 500 or other broad indexes, all the noise may not make much of a difference.

Stocks do tend to get shakier in the months leading up to Election Day. Even the bond market sees an average 15% rise in volatility from mid-September of an election year through Election Day, according to a review by Monica Guerra, a strategist at Morgan Stanley. That may partly be because financial markets hate uncertainty. In the runup to the election, uncertainty is high about what kinds of policies will win out.

But after the results come in, regardless of which party wins the White House, the uncertainty dissipates, and markets get back to work. The volatility tends to steady itself, Guerra’s review shows.

More than which party controls the White House, what’s mattered for stocks over the long term is where the U.S. economy is in its cycle as it moved from recession to expansion and back again through the decades.

“Over the long term, market performance is more closely correlated with the business cycle than political party control,” Guerra wrote in a recent report.

Where the economy currently is in its cycle is up for debate. It's been growing since the 2020 recession caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Some pessimistic investors think the expansion is near its end, with all the cumulative slowing effects of the Federal Reserve's hikes to interest rates in prior years still to be felt. Other, more optimistic investors believe the expansion may still have legs now that the Fed is cutting rates to juice the economy.

An image of President-elect Donald Trump appears on a television screen on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, Nov. 9, 2016. (AP Photo/Richard Drew, File)

Politics may have some sway underneath the surface of stock indexes and influence which industries and sectors are doing the best. Tech and financial stocks have historically done better than the rest of the market one year after a Democratic president took office. For a Republican, meanwhile, raw-material producers were among the relative winners, according to Morgan Stanley.

Plus, control of Congress may be just as important as who wins the White House. A gridlocked Washington with split control will likely see less sweeping changes in fiscal or tax policy, no matter who the president is.

Of course, the candidates in this election do differ from history in some major ways. Former President Donald Trump is a strong proponent of tariffs, which raise the cost of imports from other countries, for example.

In a scenario where the United States applied sustained and universal tariffs, economists and strategists at UBS Global Wealth Management say U.S. stocks could fall by around 10% because the tariffs would ultimately act like a sales tax on U.S. households.

But they also see a relatively low chance of such a scenario happening, at roughly 10%.

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