Anatole Kaletsky

Ronald Reagan had a catchphrase when faced with a crisis, especially a synthetic “crisis” of the kind Washington loves to concoct. He would call in the officials and media advisers rushing manically around the West Wing and calmly tell them: “Don’t just do something – stand there.”  In this respect, as in several others, “No Drama Obama” seems to resemble the man he once admiringly described, despite their ideological animosity, as the last great “transformational” U.S. president.

With Wall Street hitting new records as Washington supposedly plunges into its latest fiscal crisis with the budget sequestration that began this week, Obama could do well to emulate Reagan’s laid-back style. In addition to doing nothing about the latest manufactured fiscal crisis, he could explain why nothing is the right thing to do.

To be more specific, Obama could negotiate a truce in the budget war. Instead of insisting that Republicans must “pay” for Democratic spending cuts by agreeing to higher taxes, the president could offer a much more attractive deal to both sides. If Republicans eased the sequester and demanded no new spending cuts, the Democrats could promise not to raise any taxes. Such a ceasefire would  be seen by both parties as an honorable draw. Republicans would have fulfilled their pledge to stop higher taxes; while Democrats would have thwarted efforts to gut government and the welfare state.

There would be only one drawback. My fiscal ceasefire proposal does nothing to reduce deficits or government debts. But doing nothing on deficits is exactly the right policy for the U.S. today. Apart from the political pendulum, which is swinging all over the world against austerity, as described in this column last week, there are four strong economic arguments for U.S.  “deficit denial.”

First, there is absolutely no market pressure on the U.S. government to reduce borrowing. On the contrary, investors are so desperate to lend to the U.S. Treasury that unlimited amounts can be raised in the bond market at the lowest interest rates ever offered. While these low rates are partly due to Federal Reserve monetary policies, private investors, too, have been stampeding into U.S. bonds. Since nobody is forcing American individual savers or foreign sovereign wealth funds to lend money to the U.S. government on the same generous terms as the Fed, these lenders presumably believe that U.S. Treasury bonds are a good investment.

The House of Representatives decision to suspend the U.S. Treasury debt limit is the most important political event in America since President Barack Obama was first elected in 2008.  As anticipated in this column immediately after the 2012 election, Washington seems to have broken its addiction to deadly games of economic chicken. That, in turn, should mean an orderly resolution of all U.S. fiscal problems and perhaps even an outbreak of bipartisan political cooperation, at least on economic issues, of a kind not seen in Washington since the early 1990s.

None of these favorable outcomes is yet acknowledged as true in Washington or Wall Street. Political analysts and market pundits have almost unanimously described the House decision as a diversionary tactic, simply designed to shift the high-noon confrontation with Obama to a new battleground more favorable to the Republican side: the March 1 date for automatic spending cuts under the sequestration procedure, or the March 27 expiration date of current government budgets.

This cynicism will almost certainly be proved wrong. The obvious reason is that an army in full retreat, as the Republicans have been since the election and fiscal cliff fiasco, finds it hard to regroup against an enemy enjoying strong momentum. And when such a battered force does attempt a last stand, this usually results in a rout. In this case, however, there are more specific reasons for the Republicans to seek peaceful coexistence instead of the fight-to-the-death over borrowing and spending that many pundits still predict. To see why House leaders decided to unilaterally disarm their nuclear weapons — first the fiscal cliff and now the debt ceiling — one has to understand the transformation in U.S. political dynamics that occurred the moment the votes were counted on Nov. 6.

President Barack Obama’s re-election is good news for the world economy and financial markets. Of course a victory by Mitt Romney, unlikely though it was, might have been even better news, which is perhaps why stock markets fell sharply after the election. If Romney had won, his promised tax cuts and willingness to ignore budget deficits would have delivered a big stimulus to the U.S. economy and triggered a potential boom. But even without this fiscal boost, recent U.S. economic indicators, especially on housing, employment and bank lending, have pointed clearly in the right direction – and now there is every reason to expect these positive trends to accelerate.

While the election was a genuine obstacle to U.S. economic recovery, the problem lay not in the policies of either Obama and Romney but in the uncertainty about whose policies would be implemented and what each party might do to sabotage the other’s plans. This political doubt delayed investment decisions and hiring plans, and, in corporate bank accounts and bond markets, clogged the flood of new money created by the Federal Reserve. Now that the election is over, this dam will start to open. Political polarization, at least on economic issues, will start to ease. And the confrontation over taxes and public spending looming at the end of the year should be resolved with much less rancor than expected. All these optimistic conclusions follow from one crucial feature of the election result: The calculations of self-interest for politicians in Washington, for investors on Wall Street and for business people across America have now been transformed.

Let us begin with the business community. Much of it has been fiercely opposed to President Obama, particularly to his signature policies of universal healthcare and restoring Bill Clinton’s top tax rates. Given that, surveys suggested that many companies, and especially small businesses, suspended normal decisions on hiring and investment for months before the election, while they waited for Obamacare to be abandoned and tax hikes to be ruled out.