The investment firm Goldman Sachs conducted a poll of its clients and found nearly universal agreement that President Trump will win reelection in 2020, with 87% of respondents bullish about Trump’s chances. The poll was conducted this week among attendees of its Global Strategy Conference in London. An average of 160 responses were elicited for each question, according to Business Insider, which noted, “The bank published its results in a research note Thursday.”
Business Insider noted, “Goldman’s U.S. strategists haven’t predicted who will win the election but have warned that if one party holds the House and the Senate and Trump’s 2017 tax cuts are rolled back, corporate earnings per share could drop by 7% next year — a sharp deviation from the strategists’ baseline estimate of a 5% rise.”
Respondents exuded confidence that a recession in the United States would not occur during 2020, with only 5% of them thinking such a situation would eventuate. 35% of respondents said a recession would hit in 2021, with 38% expecting one in 2022. Goldman’s economists thought there was less than one chance in five that a recession would hit in 2020. Over two-thirds of respondents thought interest rates would not rise this year; only 4% disagreed.
The prognosis for Trump’s reelection has changed significantly in the last nine months; last April, Goldman Sachs economists thought Trump would win but it would be a “close call,” as CNBC reported. Goldman Sachs’ chief economist, Jan Hatzius, noted that incumbent presidents usually had a “built-in advantage” of 5 to 6 percentage points in the popular vote, adding, “The advantage of first-term incumbency and the relatively strong economic performance ahead of the presidential election suggest that President Trump is more likely to win a second term than the eventual Democratic candidate is to defeat him.”
CNBC stated that Goldman Sachs cited the gains in wage gains and employment as reasaons Trump would be reelected. Hatzius asserted, “A strong economy should help the president’s reelection chances … Political scientists have developed a number of election models over the years that rely mainly on economic variables to predict the two-party popular vote.”
CNBC wrote, “Additionally, incumbents finishing the first term for their party have received a greater share of the two-party vote than candidates whose party has already controlled the White House for two or more terms, according to Goldman. This ‘prominent’ historic pattern would give Trump a ‘narrow advantage,’ Hatzius said.”
Hatzius concluded, “We note that if President Trump maintains his -9.6pp net approval rating, combining this approach with our economic forecast suggests that he would win the two-party popular vote by a slim margin.”
An RBC survey in April found 70% of market insiders believing Trump would win reelection in 2020.
Goldman Sachs has locations in 30 countries; clients have to be business-savvy, it would appear, as Jonathan Jones, former head of recruiting at Goldman Sachs, stated in 2018:
Generally speaking, to become a client of Goldman’s private wealth management business requires you to have a minimum of $25 million in investable assets (and ideally rather more). Most of Goldman’s other businesses are focused entirely on institutional clients and are relatively concentrated in terms of the competition (for example, there are only so many firms in the world that are equipped to handle a cross-border merger transaction between two Fortune 100 companies).