Like Wall Street, Budget Policymakers Need Certainty

Wall Street, which supposedly hates uncertainty, was clearly unhappy late last week. On Thursday, in the face of a report showing not just that the economy had stopped declining but that it had actually grown faster than expected in the third quarter, the Dow Jones industrial average rallied by almost 200 points. Then, after a separate report on Friday showed that consumer spending had fallen by an unexpectedly large amount in that same quarter, the market sold off by more than the previous day’s gain as the Dow fell by about 250 points.