Obama mania absent at Stock Exchange

Nov 6 2008 By Nevill Boyd Maunsell

Stock markets were in no mood yesterday to join in the plaudits for Barack Obama.

If they were inclined to celebrate his election and the end to the chaotic Bush era, they were doing so last week. Yesterday’s event was already in the price.

Anyway, markets rarely cheer the election of a left-wing political leader. By American standards, the President-elect is undoubtedly that, by modern British standards, too.

He has gone beyond extending a promise of tax rebates to non-taxpayers – seemingly like G Brown’s pathetically maladministered tax credits – by coupling them with tax increases for anyone on more than $250,000 a year.

New Labour would never do a thing like that.

The Lib Dems championed something of the sort for a couple of elections, but decided it was a waste of good votes and came out for tax cuts instead.

Plainly, the scale of Obama’s triumph owes something to “the economy stupid”. McCain’s surge in the polls crumbled from the moment Lehman Brothers crashed. But if the new President’s promise of “change” is to include to novel efforts to combat the recession, he has kept quiet about them.

He backed President Bush’s multi-billion bail out of the Wall Street banks that caused the sub-prime trouble in the first place.

Then he promised more of the same – a £175 billion “new economic stimulus” with an infrastructure spending spree as well as the tax rebates for low earners.

He is also keeping clear of the world economic summit Bush has called for November 15, without saying why. We must hope that reflects an understandable reluctance to contaminate himself with any Bush activity, not the ominously protectionist noises he uttered earlier in his campaign.

These amounted to talk of punishing companies that “export American jobs” and the like, rather than a fortress America array quotas and tariffs like those which turned the Wall Street crash of 1929 into the Great Depression of the 1930s.

The danger in times like these is that one thing can lead to another.

What we do know is that the President-to-be is a consummate political organiser as well as an inspirational orator. He harnessed the Internet to raise funds as never before and at the same time to mobilise his supporters.

Post-Obama, no politician can plead for state funding for his party on the grounds that it is the only way to keep the yachtocracy out of it.