American economy was ticks back up to A by Trump's Administration

In the year since Donald Trump won the U.S. presidency, earnings have crept upward, employers have added 1.8 million jobs, and the stock market has soared by 22%. That’s enough to boost Trump’s grade on the economy to A- in the latest installment of the Yahoo Finance Trumponomics Report Card.

Trump’s initial grade was a B when we launched the report card in May. Strong job growth — including the manufacturing sector — and the seemingly unstoppable stock market pushed his grade to B+ over the summer, then to A- in September. The grade fell by one notch after a weak employment report for September, which was largely due to hurricanes that slammed Texas and Florida. But hiring came back strong in October, pushing the grade back to A-.

Our Trumponomics Report Card measures six key economic indicators under Trump compared with six prior presidents at the same point in their presidency, going back to Jimmy Carter in the 1970s. Moody’s Analytics provides the data, which we convert into letter grades. (Here’s our complete methodology.) Job growth was stronger at the same point in the first terms of Jimmy Carter in 1977 and Bill Clinton in 1993.

The stock market did better in the early days of Barack Obama and George H.W. Bush. But Trump is presiding over a kind of Goldilocks economy that isn’t exactly roaring, but its doing reasonably well all around. Here’s how he measures up on our six indicators:

With every update to the report card, we point out that Trump inherited an economy that had been steadily improving for years. The pace of job growth today is roughly the same as it was during the last two years of the Obama presidency. The stock market began to recover from post-recession lows all the way back in 2009, and has mostly gone upward since. It won’t truly be the Trump economy until he’s been in office for at least a year, maybe more.

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