Bush boom!

...The Standard & Poor's 500 Index -- the benchmark for American equities -- is down 2.8 percent since Bush took office five years and two months ago. That's the worst performance during the same stage of any two-term administration in the past half century except that of Richard M. Nixon....

By comparison with other two-term administrations of the past half-century, the index grew 153.6 percent at this point during the presidency of Bill Clinton, 79.7 percent for Ronald Reagan, 61.9 percent under Dwight D. Eisenhower and 45.4 percent during the Kennedy-Johnson administration. At the same stage in Nixon's presidency the S&P dropped 4.1 percent....

And this is now -- imagine what happens in the event of another large terrorist attack on the U.S., or a full-scale civil war in Iraq that turns regional, or a bird flu pandemic that involves human-to-human transmission, or a serious oil-price shock caused by tensions between America and, say, Iran or Venezuela, or even the bursting of the housing bubble. Anyone sorry we didn't go for those Social Security private investment accounts?

(Via DU.)