election analysis paralysis

At the risk of dwelling on a topic that was shot down by the election
- the economy and its relation to the people's decision for this or
against that candidate - I took a cursory look at Wall Street
reactions (I mean intelligent comments, not hoorays, guffahs, and
other knee-jerks) to the election. Mostly, analysts have exercised
remarkable restraint - as if to say, so what.

Can this be right? While television spent tens of thousands of
program hours on pre- and post-election analysis, and the nation's
newspapers slaughtered entire forests to ship copious copy of
punditry, talking points, stump phrases and op-ed wisdom, the most
highly paid analysts in the country just shrug?

Indeed. They're not paid to take up airspace - they're looking for
calculable effects. How much influence does any president have on the
things that matter to financial analysis? Consumer debt, home prices
and the trade deficit are largely not within the power of the U.S.
President to solve. You may want to believe that an oil team in the
White House can control oil prices, but the reality is, they may
share that pipe-dream, but they still don't control oil. Does the
choice of president directly influence hiring and firing in the US
job markets? Hard to quantify how and why. Corporate capital
expenditure? About all of these it's easy to speculate how elections
might inflect results - but it's all just hot air.

Welcome to the distraction economy. Unless you're a media analyst
devoted to figuring out how many policy blogs Google can spider
before getting bogged down, or bent on pushing the still barely
tolerable ratio of highly priced advertising to mindlessly repetitive
posturing by talking heads, the election, for now, has nothing to do
with high finance, and to that extent, the voters perhaps correctly
ignored the economy and focused on the horror of dudes kissing.

However, once you remember that the Bush program - self-directed
social security funding, combined with lower income taxes for the
investor class, a low dividend tax rate and encouragements for
dividends - should spell out future demand for investments, you
realize that of course the election has economic consequences. Where
is the analysis? Not on the blogs; not in the papers; not on
television. - But enough already about the election. This is not a
policy blog, after all...