Since the financial crisis and ensuing Great Recession, we've all become accustomed to the increasingly active role that politicians (and global central banks) have taken in managing economic and market outcomes. For today's investors, political risk has become a near-constant phenomenon, an integral part of the market's ongoing background noise. And yet, even against that backdrop, this year's U.S. presidential election stands out as a particularly nerve-racking event.
Not surprisingly, breathless headlines abound. On one side, the uncertainty associated with a potentially volatile Donald Trump presidency has yielded predictions of steep stock market losses of 20% or more. Not to be outdone, Trump's supporters have gone so far as to predict that "Hillary Clinton will destroy the whole world" if she is elected (credit investor and newsletter publisher Marc Faber for that one).
Market-related predictions have become a quadrennial tradition, but that doesn't mean that they're worth the…