Don't short Obama

[malaise]

http://www.slate.com/id/2248566?nav=wp
<snip>
Is there a larger lesson here? (Aside from the obvious one, which is political futures markets usually aren't very good at predicting what actually will happen in the future?) I think so. And it's this: Don't short Obama. In fact, that's been the lesson of Obama's entire career so far.

It would be very difficult to tote up all the times pundits pronounced the health care bill dead, and the prospects for the Obama administration dire—especially after the election of Scott Brown in January. Intrade, the political futures market, which functions as a conventional-wisdom-processing machine, also got health care wrong.

On some level, it's tough to blame the Intrade crowd for getting Obama and health care wrong. The type of people who trade there, folks who think they're quite savvy about money, the market, and politics, are the same conventional wisdom hawkers who were so monumentally wrong before the financial crisis. If you've tuned into CNBC or Fox Business Channel, or read the Wall Street Journal since January 2009, you would have been subject to a constant stream of money managers, pundits, talking heads, and policy wonks declaring that the U.S. economy is becoming a socialist hellhole that is hostile to business and investors. (If there were a way to short Fox Business Channel, I'd do it in a hurry.)

The conventional wisdom market has not yet internalized the message that it's dangerous to your financial and professional health to short Obama. Judging by the debate in the House last night, by the talk on cable news shows this morning (full of talk about how this is going to kill Democrats in November), and by the chatter on the business networks this morning (full of talk about how the tax increases in the health care bill will destroy the markets and the economy), the shorts haven't learned anything.
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:rofl: :rofl:

[MindandSoul]

1. That's right. . .but it really works in our advantage, because they keep on

proving that they don't know what they're talking about!