President Biden's economic policy has garnered mixed results for the administration as some of the policies have seemed to help with inflation, but have not moved voters. President Biden's approval rating has suffered and fallen lower in recent weeks.
Yahoo Finance Senior Columnist Rick Newman joins the Live show to discuss how Bidenomics has performed in 2023, what it has accomplished, and what it still has left to fix going into 2024.
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Video Transcript
JULIE HYMAN: Bidenomics has been complicated for the White House as the president's approval rating hovers near record lows, despite a pretty solid economy. Rick Newman here with the details on the final trading day of the year. Hi, Rick.
RICK NEWMAN: Hey, guys. I looked at some things that went right and some things that went wrong in 2023 to figure out what Biden needs to have a pretty good shot at re-election in 2024. So some really important things did go right for Biden in '23. I'll just tick them off really fast. I'm listing four.
Inflation came down sharply. Job growth and economic growth held up. That's the so-called soft landing. We're having this great stock market boom to end the year. S&P 500 up 24% for 2023. And energy prices got cheaper, and that's a big one that voters care about obviously. So there's a little bit of momentum at the end of 2023 here, with consumer confidence picking up a little bit, perhaps the shock of inflation is finally starting to wear off.
But there are some other things that are going wrong. And just to go through them really quickly, there's some new data from the Saint Louis Federal Reserve that shows that financial stress is actually getting worse, and that is measured by an increase in delinquency rates on auto loans and credit cards that is now as bad as it was during the Great Recession in 2008 and 2009. That obviously is not good.
We've got problems with wars. People are freaked out about wars. And that migrant crisis on the border is a real train wreck, and Biden does not seem to have his arms around that. And that could get worse before it gets better. So a lot of different forces playing against each other as we go into 2024.
- Rick, we know that voters really don't like being told that the economy is better than it feels to them when they are checking out at the grocery store. This is a recurring theme that I've heard from voters when covering these elections. Talk to me about where the biggest problem lies in Bidenomics. Is part of it a branding problem for President Biden when he inevitably hits the campaign trail or is it in the specifics of the policy?