We don’t spend too much time on politics unless it is happening in a far-away land. For instance, we’ve been studying up on the nineteen-year-old successor to the murdered Pakistani opposition leader but couldn’t tell you anything about how Hillary Clinton’s plans to separate people from their money from Barack Obama’s. Or whether John McCain’s plans to rollback allegedly rogue regimes are any more realistic than those of Rudolph Giuliani (who is somehow still running for president). Mitt Romney worked for Bain once but appears to be the worst campaigning politician in recent memory who is not a Greek from Massachusetts.
Our political friends tell us that McCain will win tonight in New Hampshire, and Obama will thoroughly trounce Clinton. (Although too strong a showing among independents by Obama could hurt McCain's chances.) Neither of these gentlemen is especially a friend of Wall Street. Both can be expected to sign into law the tax hikes sure to be passed by the Democrat controlled houses on Capitol Hill. Both can be expected to support more regulation and bureaucracy, and less political and economic liberty. If we made little progress against the rapid growth of government during the Bush years, we can expect even less under either of these gentlemen.
But its also likely that the doomsday scenarios emanating from some pundits are over-wrought. The Greenspan era policies of low-interest rates and the Republican Congress encouraged government spending growth probably did more damage to the economic health of the Republic than any Clinton tax-hike ever did. There may not be too much good news for investors and Wall Street coming from New Hampshire tonight except for this: this too shall pass.
Posted by , Jan 08, 2008 4:11PM
apparently - maria b can't spell bear