All of this gives us a rather different perspective on what the stock market is really telling us about the broader economy. The CEI is down about 10 percent since Election Day, is up about 10 percent since the last day of trading before Obama announced his "aggressive" stimulus, and is essentially unchanged since Obama's inauguration. The market is not becoming particularly more pessimistic about macroeconomic conditions (although it has certainly retained its previous pessimism) -- if this were true, we'd see cyclical stocks losing further value relative to more economically robust ones. But that largely isn't what we've been seen. Instead, the stock market is engaged in something of a pity party -- the prevailing emotions being fear and loathing. It is concerned about policies which might be burdensome to equityholders in large corporations while perhaps nevertheless being boons to economic recovery.

FiveThirtyEight.com: Politics Done Right: What the Stock Market Thinks About the Economy