This week, the president of the United States suggested that the increase in the stock market could be lessening the national debt “in a sense”.

“The country — we took it over and owed over $20 trillion,” he said in an interview on Fox News’ “Hannity” on Wednesday night. “As you know the last eight years, they borrowed more than it did in the whole history of our country. So they borrowed more than $10 trillion, right? And yet, we picked up $5.2 trillion just in the stock market. Possibly picked up the whole thing in terms of the first nine months, in terms of value. So you could say, in one sense, we’re really increasing values. And maybe in a sense we’re reducing debt.”

But was he correct? Not a chance (insert “lol” here).

The debt from the federal government is in no way related to the actual value of pricate corporations. Realistically, any increase in the value of companies helps shareholders. But the rise in the stock market alone could have no impact on the actual debt of the nation unless stocks are sold. This is the point where those shareholders would pay their capital gains taxes to the federal government on the amount of money that they earned.

“Even a record jump in capital gains next year would only reduce further borrowing by about $50 billion,” notes the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

But then again, the president may have been correct on a couple of topics. The national debt is a little over $20 trillion. The gross debt increased about $9 trillion during the Obama administration from $10.6 trillion to $19.9 trillion. The glaring outlier here though, is that former president Obama isn’t the lone sole responsible for the increased debt. But hey, at least the current President had a few numbers correct, right?