DealBook: K.K.R. Profit More Than Doubled in Fourth Quarter

Off the Charts: S.&P. Has More Than Doubled Under Obama

Through Friday, more than 52 months after he took office, the index was up 105 percent during his term in office, for a compound annual gain of 18 percent.

There is, of course, more than a little good fortune in that statistic. Mr. Obama took office on Jan. 20, 2009, in the middle of a credit crisis that had caused prices to plunge and would cause them to keep falling for a few more weeks. It helps to start from a very low level. It also helps to have a central bank that drove short-term interest rates to zero, a step that both increased corporate profits and made bonds less attractive investments.

In fact, the United States stock market fell from record high levels this week, and world markets quavered, in part because of comments made by the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben Bernanke, that the Fed might be able to begin to back off from its aggressive monetary stance later this year.

Even with this week’s dip, however, the United States market has done better since early 2009 than any of the next nine largest economies in the world, as can be seen in the accompanying charts. Those charts reflect MSCI indexes, based in dollars, in each country except the United States, where the S.& P. 500 is used.

The United States market lagged many others early in the recovery. But as its economy kept growing, albeit slowly, and European economies faltered and worries grew that emerging economies might experience slower growth, the American market overtook the others.

Of the next nine — ranked on the size of the economies in 2009, only India’s market came close to the performance of the United States market since early 2009. Like the Chinese and Brazilian markets, it excelled early on but is now well below the peak it hit in 2011.

If you put your dollars into the Italian or Spanish stock markets when Mr. Obama took office, your shares would now be worth less than you paid for them. Over all, the world’s stock markets outside the United States have risen less than two-thirds as much as the American one has.

The Wall Street performance has not made Mr. Obama particularly popular among financiers. Indeed, some of the language about the president’s perceived support of socialism and hostility to capitalism during last year’s campaign was the harshest seen in any campaign since 1936, when Franklin D. Roosevelt was seeking a second term and was strongly opposed by many financiers.

By the time Mr. Roosevelt died in 1945, the S.& P. 500 was 141 percent higher than it had been when he took office. But he was in office so long that the annual rate of gain was only 7.5 percent, less than half of the rate so far for the Obama administration.

The other presidents whose term in office included a doubling in the S.& P. were Dwight D. Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. Each served two full terms, and none came close to the average annual gain so far under Mr. Obama. Mr. Clinton’s 15.2 percent was the highest of that group. He had the good fortune to enter office when markets were relatively low and to leave just as the technology stock bubble was starting to collapse.

There is, of course, no guarantee that a market that rises will endure. Mr. Roosevelt’s record would be better if he had left after one term in office; the market was lower when he died in 1945 than it had been when he took the oath of office in 1937 for his second term.

And the president with the best stock market record in the 20th century — using the Dow Jones industrial average, whose history is longer than that of the S.& P. — is Calvin Coolidge. The Dow rose 256 percent — an annual rate of 25.5 percent — from his inauguration in 1923 until he left office in early 1929. The market went up an additional 20 percent before the crash. But by the end of 1931 all of the Coolidge gains had been lost.

Floyd Norris comments on finance and the economy at nytimes.com/economix.

Hulu Says Number of Paid Subscribers Has Doubled

Hulu, the online video Web site that has both free and paid services, said Tuesday that it had doubled its number of paying subscribers in the last year, to four million.

The announcement comes at an uncertain time for Hulu, as two of its owners, the Walt Disney Company and News Corporation, weigh whether to sell the company. Last month, the founding chief executive of Hulu, Jason Kilar, stepped down; one of his top lieutenants, Andy Forssell, is now the acting chief executive.

Hulu was not expected to say anything new about its ownership structure at a Tuesday morning event for advertisers in New York. The event, part of the Digital Content NewFronts this week, was set up to promote several original series that will premiere on Hulu this year.

Among the shows that will be distributed exclusively by Hulu are “Quick Draw,'’ a comedic Western set in 1870s Kansas, and “The Awesomes,” an animated series about superheroes from the minds of the “Saturday Night Live” star Seth Meyers and the “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon” producer Michael Shoemaker. They are the third wave of original shows for the service, and the most ambitious to date. The first wave, in 2011, was led by the Morgan Spurlock documentary series “A Day In The Life;” the second, in 2012, included a political sitcom called “Battleground” and a travelogue by Richard Linklater called “Up to Speed.”

That said, Hulu’s most popular shows remain those that it licenses from their owners and from other media companies. Hulu says it has more than 470 such partners and more than 70,000 full television episodes on its free and paid services combined.

Content costs are rising as the online television marketplace becomes more competitive; last week, Yahoo snapped up the exclusive rights to old clips from “Saturday Night Live,” something that Hulu used to feature on its own site.

In this crowded environment, commissioning shows is one way to stand out. Hulu has been in the news this week because it is one of only two places to watch “All My Children” and “One Life to Live,” the canceled ABC soap operas that were resurrected online by a production company, Prospect Park. The other outlet for the shows is Apple’s iTunes store.

Along with “The Awesomes” and “Quick Draw,” Hulu’s other two original series this year are “Behind the Mask,” a documentary series about sports mascots, and “The Wrong Mans,” a drama about two innocent men tied up in a criminal conspiracy. “The Wrong Mans” is a coproduction of the BBC and Hulu.

At the advertiser event on Tuesday, Hulu will also promote a number of shows that have been televised in other countries, but are exclusive to Hulu in the United States. They include an animated series from Canada called “Mother Up!” as well as “Prisoners of War,” an Israeli drama that inspired Showtime’s “Homeland.”

The company will also describe several ideas for original shows that are “brand contingent,” meaning they will be made only if advertisers sign up to support them. One of these ideas involves the chef Mario Batali in conversation with celebrities; another is a performance series to be hosted by Carson Daly.

In addition to announcing that its paid service, Hulu Plus, had topped four million subscribers for the first time, up from two million in the previous year, Hulu said it had reached a new revenue record in the first quarter, but did not specify what that record was. In 2012, according to the company, it earned $695 million in revenue, up from approximately $420 million in 2011.