Stocks fell sharply this morning in early Wall Street trading, which may or may not indicate that investors are unhappy with Obama's reelection. "The Dow Jones industrial average fell 197 points, or 1.5%, to 13,048 shortly after the opening bell. The broader Standard & Poor's 500 index lost 21 points, or 1.5%, to 1,407. The Nasdaq was down 41 points, or 1.4%, to 2,971."

  • Momof2boys

    Of course the big investors are unhappy. Obama wants them to actually PAY taxes!

    • http://mordicai.livejournal.com Mordicai

       ”People with disproportionate amounts of wealth threw a temper tantrum today…”

      • acerplatanoides

         Not as large of one as they threw 4 years ago.

      • niktemadur

        The stock market is like a fat, spoiled, petulant child who everybody tries to instantly appease every time it pulls a tantrum like this, which is often.
        Anybody ever consider sending Dow Jones to bed without supper, for once?

  • keihin

    The word “Sell” doesn’t exactly tell the whole story.  Things have changed, and the world adjusts.  Many securities are being bought as well.  It’s a structural shift, and not unexpected.  Expectations about the legal and regulatory landscape have been altered. Some investments are worth more in this new world, and some are worth less.  Bonds are up, precious metals are down, the dollar is up, and the stocks of big financial companies are down.

  • http://twitter.com/rvitelli Romeo Vitelli

    I don’t think things would be different if Romney were elected.  Now that the election is over, the same old problems still exist.  And then there’s the matter of the upcoming “fiscal cliff” if President Obama and the GOP-controlled congress don’t agree by  the end of December.   Things might pick up in January.

    • acerplatanoides

      And it might rain in February, i just don’t know. By June there could be other things. I’m totally with you Romeo. Same Page.

  • misterx001

    Other things that make the Dow rise and fall: the rain, rumors, weekdays that end in ‘y’…

    It’s worth noting that the stock market made a huge climb yesterday, and all the usual suspects were claiming exactly the opposite: that the market supported an Obama presidency.

    • oasisob1

      Also, psychics.

  • peregrinus

    A small penalty to pay as we smilingly watch the pork barrel roll that little bit further away from greasy and greedy fingers.  Boy, they’re mad about that.

    • http://mordicai.livejournal.com Mordicai

       A REAL little bit, but I’ll take a lil’ farther away over a lot closer any day.

  • waetherman

    I really hate these kinds of headlines – to the layperson they imply that somehow Obama being elected will be bad for the economy when that’s simply not the case. 

    First, correlation is not causation. There are a lot of factors that go in to the ebb and flow of the stock market; debt crisis in Europe reducing potential exports, fighting in Syria threatening middle-east oil supply stability, and Chris Christie eating a hoagie for lunch that may have been the one that puts him on a path to a heart attack before he can become the next President in 2016. Sure, the presidential election probably has some effect, but it’s lumped in with a million other “butterfly effects” that impact the markets.
    Second, ”the market” is an idiot. Its movement is based largely on reactive emotion not on research or science, especially in cases like this. While some traders might think Obama will be bad for the economy, it’s more likely that any dip attributable to the election is the result of a much larger number of traders thinking that other traders think Obama is bad for the economy and they are trading based on that speculation. Still a larger group is probably trading on the theory that other traders will be trading on the theory that other traders think Obama is bad for the economy. So it’s all a self-fulfilling prophecy that somehow gets turned in to a headline that suggest that Obama is actually bad for the economy.

    • acerplatanoides

      yeah, you’re right, the election meant nothing at all.

      • Boston Globe

        Anyone who did a few minutes of research (FOX and CNN don’t count) would have known that Obama was heavily favored to win. (See http://www.fivethirtyeight.com for example).  If investors chose to wait until today to react to that information then they’re idiots.  (Why sell low today when they could have sold higher yesterday?)  If investors are this stupid then Wall St and you have much bigger worries than Obama.

        • acerplatanoides

           You may have missed the mile wide stripe of snark in the middle of my comment.

          • waetherman

            The difference between subtlety, snark and sarcasm is difficult to identify on the Internet. In fact, it is so hard to distinguish that it has caused the Dow to drop more than 300 points today!

          • acerplatanoides

             I hardly think Darmok and Jalad threw the Dow in the Sarchasm without some help from you and I.

          • peregrinus

            susnarcasm

            I’d like to mesh those three words you so beautifully brought up!

          • waetherman

            Wow. You went super deep-geek with that Darmok comment. Now I’m totally Riker and the Tamarians. 

          • acerplatanoides

            it’s a great example of what happens so often here at BB. I think I stole it from one of the mods.

        • chgoliz

          Considering how many Republicans were still holding out hope very late last night, I think in general they assumed the market was going to hand out hot cocoa and puppies today in celebration of a Romney win.

          • waetherman

            Republicans hate puppies. They do love hot cocoa though. Maybe we  should all bring a thermos down to wall street to cheer them up (and save our IRAs in the process). 

          • chgoliz

            Puppies love you and follow you everywhere no matter how many times you kick them or how much you starve them.  Are you sure it’s not kittens that they hate?

        • Antinous / Moderator

          Old Money doesn’t twitch at things like this. They just buy up the discounted stock when the people who get their financial advice from cable television sell theirs.

          • chgoliz

            Yes, sadly, that is exactly what happens.

    • peregrinus

      Obama is better for the long term economy.  Worse perhaps for quick grabs and snake oil dispensers.

      Don’t forget that influential traders will have peddled the idea that Obama isn’t good for the economy in the run-up to the election; meanwhile shorting the stocks in the sectors they talked down; allowing them to profit as the herd rushed to heed their “judgements”.

      Anytime I have the misfortune to listen to traders speaking about their business, they have mostly minimal comprehension of the economics behind their world.  You’re right – it’s all “emotion”, pent up in a small community of money-chasers, which results in a distorted and strange view of the world.

      Put these minor corrections into perspective:  on 29 Sep 2008 NASDAQ fell 9.14% as the realities of the financial crisis sank in.

      So worst case – the markets think Obama is 1/9 as bad as the financial crisis.

      I take heart from that!

  • bishophicks

    It will go back up.  There is often a short term reaction based on an election, but things settle out over the following week or so because there really is no difference between current conditions now and the conditions from a couple of days ago, so why should prices be drastically different.  It’s not like people who are numbers experts were actually thinking Romney would win.  The main thing is that if Romney won, House Republicans would have made an instant deal on the Fiscal Cliff to prevent any sort of economic harm from occurring as he took office.  Now an easy deal is less likely and if Republicans are still in “anything that helps Obama in any way is bad and compromise means do it our way or the economy gets it” mode there could be problems.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=507025304 Tay Quartermain

    The stock market hates women too. Who would have thought. 

  • http://lemoutan.blogspot.com/ Lemoutan

    So, stocks going cheap then? Buy, I say.

  • GawainLavers

    Their biggest investment over the last year didn’t pay out.  What a shame…

  • Colin Curry

    If you look at this drop in the context of the last year or 5 years, it’s pretty well within the range of normal variation. So even if people are scared of Obama, they’re not that scared. Look at the 200 day moving average, the DJIA has been gaining pretty consistently since February. Markets go up or down, analysts speculate as to why, but most of the time short term variation isn’t easily explained.

  • http://www.jjsaul.com Jim Saul

    It’ll bounce by the end of the day, then march upward from there.

    The real danger is the continuing domination of the House by those whose gimp-leashes are held by Grover Norquist.

  • Chris Pratt

    Sure. Why actually bother with analysis when you can just write a eyeball-driving headline and spew some intellectually-devoid correlation you might see on the back of a Denny’s menu. The Dow dropped this morning due to news out of Europe regarding worsening situation in Greece, and principally that Germany’s economy is starting to stall out now. It was *not* because Obama was re-elected. Even what little part the election did play in the Dow’s drop was due not to Obama winning but to the status quo: same President, same Senate and same House. The fear is that since these three have not been able to work a deal on fiscal cliff thus far, they won’t be more able now.

    • Jerril

       What, there’s something happening other than an election in the USA? Something to do with places that aren’t the USA? That stuff isn’t important at all, it MUST be because of local factors! /snark

    • Joe Palozzi

      Thank you chris for actually posting the reported cause, and not a sensationalist response. In other news hospital and health care stocks are trading higher…

  • Shinkuhadoken

    It’s the fiscal cliff. Because the political make-up of the federal government hasn’t significantly shifted, we’re headed straight for a financial disaster (i.e. everyone’s taxes will increase when the Bush tax cuts expire) and the House is about to step on the gas. Ergo, the market is selling now.

  • corydodt

    There was an announcement that the European economy is doing worse than usual. That has far more to do with the (fairly minor) drop today. And lest we forget, the markets have skyrocketed during Obama’s first term.

  • a2ricedgti

    In no particular order:
    1) Europe bad news
    2) Less chance of resolving the fiscal cliff  without brinksmanship
    3) Increased likelihood of higher dividend and capital gains taxes
    4) Decreased likelihood of the repeal of Dodd-Frank or financial reforms.  Financial companies put huge amounts of money in to the Romney campaign.
    5) Increased likelihood business will have to pay for external costs like pollution.

    1 has little/nothing to do with Obama, 2 is unfortunate and 3-5 are very much Obama’s fault, but in my opinion they are all positive and inevitable.  Thus, while I say Obama takes much of the credit for the drop that is a GOOD thing.

  • Sean Breakey

    Remember that day when the US market completely dropped because someone sold more then he wanted to?  This is just the ultra-rich having a trantrum about maybe having to actually pay tax.

    But!, people say, honest investors are losing money, (up to but not limited to old granny’s pensions!).

    That’s because people decided to put their money on the roller coaster in the first place.  Stocks were never meant to be investments in of-themselves, you are supposed to buy stocks with the idea you will make it back through dividends.  Everyone else is just trying to game the system, (even old grannies and their pensions).

    People need to learn to invest in things like GIC’s, high interest accounts, etc.

    As every gambling institution in BC has to say, Know your limit; stay within it.

    The alternative is to say that we should not tax Casino’s because people keep betting their life savings on it.