Wall Street has greeted the Trump election with unprecedented enthusiasm.  I think that investors are recognizing that the shackles put on entrepreneurship and investment by the tax and regulatory regime of the Obama administration really did inhibit growth, and in fact explain why the current “recovery” is by far the most anemic ever recorded following a recession.

But the boom is now officially “historic.”  Steve Russolillo writes in the Wall Street Journal:

The Dow’s 8% gain in the five weeks after Donald Trump’s victory is the biggest surge following any U.S. presidential election in history. The rally, which has the blue-chip average on pace for its fastest 1,000-point rise ever, has been accompanied by a sharp jump in bullish sentiment.

Of course, what the market giveth, the market also taketh away, depending on events.  So don’t count your retirement account gains quite yet.  But nonetheless a record has been set, and a verdict (on the Obama economy) rendered.

Oh, and also a judgment on Paul Krugman, the man whose mind once won him a Nobel Prize in economics, and a professorship at Princeton.  His market wizardry was on display in the immediate aftermath of the election outcome being reported, as the Daily Caller noted:

Futures markets imploded Tuesday night as soon as it became apparent Trump was likely to win. At their nadir, futures for the Dow Jones Industrial Average had dropped 750 points.

At that point, Krugman chose to release a blog post in which he predicted these jitters represented a new permanent reality in the U.S. economy.

“It really does now look like President Donald J. Trump, and markets are plunging. When might we expect them to recover?” Krugman said in his post. “If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never.”

 “We are very probably looking at a global recession, with no end in sight,” he added. “I suppose we could get lucky somehow. But on economics, as on everything else, a terrible thing has just happened.”

Fortunately for Krugman, there is no provision for repossessing Nobel Prizes, and there is no way of knowing if he shorted the market following his own advice.

Hat tip: Ed Lasky