The rip-your-face-off stock market rally may have cooled, but the Dow Jones Industrial Average is still above 19,000 and the S&P 500 is holding above 2,200. It's almost scary, in a way, to see Wall Street surge on the surprise victory of president-elect Donald Trump — an event, the naysayers warned, that would usher in the financial apocalypse.
The opposite has happened over the last three weeks as years of cheap-money incrementalism and political gridlock have given way to genuine excitement about a possible avalanche of fiscal stimulus from Trump and the Republicans in Congress. This is more or less the kind of big league boost leftist economists like Paul Krugman of The New York Times have been calling for since the financial crisis — with some critical differences in the details of the proposals. But from the market’s perspective, the president-elect’s plans should keep stocks surging into the new year before trouble reappears.
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