Where is the Presidential honeymoon on Wall Street?

This question will be answered when the details of the stimulus package promised by the new administration emerge. President Obama has promised that a comprehensive action plan to deal with the current financial crisis will be released shortly.

Wall Street appears to be taking a cautious position until it gets these details. Based upon the past record of solutions implemented by the previous administration, this appears perfectly logical. TARP was supposed to be the final solution to the financial crisis. It appears to have increased confusion rather bringing clarity to the problem.

The current economic crisis is quite deep and global in nature. It is not subject to an easy quick fix. Wall Street will be seeking solutions in this package which can increase credit quickly and ease the unemployment picture.

Investors will also want to know how the new President will deal with the root causes of the current crisis. These are the incentives in our system to assume massive amounts of financial risk. We are seeing this with current implosion of the banking system. However, many of the individuals responsible have been allowed to retain their compensation without bearing any of the disastrous consequences. Instead, the American taxpayer seems to be bearing the cost in the form of increasingly expensive bailout packages by the government. I term these individual FreePassers™. Until the new administration addresses how to deal with this, we will only repeat these problems again in the future in a different form.