Campaign is one point of hope

By John Browne

Having received more than 60 million votes, president-elect Barack Obama has earned a spectacular personal victory and a clear mandate to bring some form of change to the United States. Obama's decisive and masterly election campaign, where he first had to outmaneuver the formidable Hillary Clinton machine, may bode well for his ability to implement a government response of unprecedented magnitude. Time will tell if this is a blessing or a curse.

In the short term, markets may likely rally on the grounds that election uncertainty is over and that Obama and a Democratic Congress may institute massive infrastructure spending along the lines of Roosevelt's New Deal. The larger question for investors will be whether government spending will make any difference to long-term performance, or whether the markets are already locked into a downward spiral that no amount of pump priming can counteract.