Why didn't the stock market crash when Trump won — like the experts said they would?

Ben Casselman looks into the wrong/bullshit prediction:

Investors didn’t necessarily want Trump to win...

You could stop right there. That's the answer. These people were lying to scare us out of voting for Trump.

... (although many probably liked some of his proposals, such as lower corporate taxes and reduced regulation), but even more than that they feared the chaos that could result from an uncertain or disputed outcome....

A few weeks back, I warned that it was risky — even irresponsible — to confidently predict how markets would react to a Trump victory. But it is just as unwise to read too much into one day of trading....

Even more uncertain is the effect that Trump’s victory will have on the economy as a whole.... But it’s too early to say how much of Trump’s agenda will be enacted.... Not all of Trump’s proposals would necessarily be bad for the economy. He wants to boost infrastructure spending, a position that’s broadly supported by economists (although Trump hasn’t given many details). He wants to implement a new tax deduction for child care expenses and expand the Earned Income Tax Credit. Some elements of his tax plan, such as eliminating the estate tax and lowering the corporate income tax rate, hew to standard conservative orthodoxy, although he departs from it in other ways.....

That reminds me. A day after hearing Trump's victory speech and thinking about what he would actually do in his endeavor to be a great President (which I believe he means to be), I thought of this paragraph:

We are going to fix our inner cities and rebuild our highways, bridges, tunnels, airports, schools, hospitals. We're going to rebuild our infrastructure, which will become, by the way, second to none. And we will put millions of our people to work as we rebuild it.

The man is a builder, and I think he can get these things built. Do that as your signature achievement, and we'll love it. Don't mess anything else up, and it will be enough.

ADDED: Don't forget: Obama wanted to build the infrastructure. He cared about putting people to work, and he got played out of it. In 2011, I wrote about how he got played. Read that and think about what a different political environment Obama had to operate within:

Here's a fascinating passage from Ron Suskind's new book "Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President" (pp. 18-19)(boldface added). Obama and his advisers are plotting campaign strategy in August 2007 and the subject turned to the problem of jobs for 10 million low- to moderately skilled male workers. What "sunrise" could the government subsize and stimulate. The advisers hit on health care:

That was where the jobs would be: nurse’s aides, companions to infirm seniors, hospital orderlies. The group bandied about ideas for how to channel job-seeking men into this growth industry. A need in one area filling a need in another. Interlocking problems, interlocking solutions. The Holy Grail of systemic change.

But Obama shook his head.

“Look, these are guys,” he said. “A lot of them see health care, being nurse’s aides, as women’s work. They need to do something that fits with how they define themselves as men.” ...

As the room chewed over the non-PC phrase “women’s work,” trying to square the senator’s point with their analytical models, [Alan] Krueger—who was chief economist at the Department of Labor in the mid-1990s at the tender age of thirty-four—sat there silently, thinking that in all his years of studying men and muscle, he had never used that term. But Obama was right. Krueger wondered how his latest research on happiness and well-being might take into account what Obama had put his finger on: that work is identity, that men like to build, to have something to show for their sweat and toil.

“Infrastructure,” he blurted out. “Rebuilding infrastructure.”

Obama nodded and smiled, seeing it instantly. “Now we’re talking. . . . Okay, let’s think about how that would work as a real centerpiece.... Don’t even get me started about potholed highways and collapsing bridges,” Obama said....

Isn't it strange that collapsing bridges are exactly what Obama is back to talking about in September 2011?

And just like that, a policy to repair the nation’s infrastructure was born. The federal government, in partnership with the private sector, would call upon the underemployed men of America to rebuild the country, and in doing so restore their pride. 

Obama wanted to rebuild masculine pride!

But what happened? Why didn't the original stimulus, in early 2009, rebuild America and America's men? I seem to remember some pushback. There was this NYT op-ed in December 2008, by Linda Hirshman:

Mr. Obama compared his infrastructure plan to the Eisenhower-era construction of the Interstate System of highways. It brings back the Eisenhower era in a less appealing way as well: there are almost no women on this road to recovery....

The bulk of the stimulus program will provide jobs for men, because building projects generate jobs in construction, where women make up only 9 percent of the work force....

Fortunately, jobs for women can be created by concentrating on professions that build the most important infrastructure — human capital. In 2007, women were 83 percent of social workers, 94 percent of child care workers, 74 percent of education, training and library workers (including 98 percent of preschool and kindergarten teachers and 92 percent of teachers’ assistants)....

And then what happened? Did Obama ever openly express his enthusiasm for masculine jobs? The terminology became "shovel-ready jobs." He couldn't say "manly jobs" or "men's work." Not only did Obama's abandon his dream of lifting up men, we didn't even get the construction work done.

And now here he is, last week, posing by a bridge that's — what? — falling down and getting accused of using the bridge as a "prop."

Oh! The masculinity!