The president has never been an investor. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have said this during his press conference last night:

With respect to the auto companies, I believe that America should have a functioning, competitive auto industry. I don’t think that taxpayers should simply put — attach an umbilical cord between the U.S. Treasury and the auto companies so that they are constantly getting subsidies, but I do think that helping them restructure at this unique period when sales — you know, the market has essentially gone from 14 million down to 9 million, I don’t think that there’s anything inappropriate about that.

Those of us who follow the indexes must have winced when we heard it (if we were still listening at that point). And I, for one, waited for him to correct himself. But he didn’t. So I concluded that he knew nothing about them. So he must have got the numbers from a briefing. He has a good mind, but not perfect, so he had the right mantissa, but his exponent was off by a factor of a thousand.

One of the distinguishing characteristics between the American republic and Latin American republics is observed in the transition between political parties in the executive branch.

In the USA, the tradition has been for new presidents to tout their own policies and not to harp on the shortcomings of their predecessor. (Likewise, past presidents have been rare to criticize the policies of current presidents.)

Obama signaled his respect for this tradition, when he vowed, soon after his inauguration, that he would “look forward, not back.”

Departures from this tradition have been few but notable. Dick Cheney did not have to say “the grown-ups are in charge” back in 2001. But, as Victor Davis Hanson points out, no one in the Eisenhower administration sought to investigate Roosevelt officials for the internment of Japanese-American citizens.  

But if you take your cues from the behavior of some Latin American presidents (such as Hugo Chavez), you would conduct your  administration as if it were an extension of an ongoing political campaign, and do your best to weaken your defeated political rivals in every possible way, including prosecution, and blame every existing problem on your predecessor rather than addressing them directly, even if you won your election through a promise of bipartisanship.