In For It.(The Talk of the Town)

Every four years, an expat hedge-fund manager, a devout and rigorous conservative and international man of mystery, comes to New York from Europe and invites a bunch of his friends and peers to celebrate Election Night with him in a suite on the nineteenth floor of a midtown hotel. In 2004, the party, lavish and jovial at the outset, degenerated into an oppressive and cigar-smoky ordeal, a kind of Hunter S. Thompson cop-convention-on-mescaline horror show, at least for a guest rooting against the incumbent. This time around, the atmosphere was more congenial and subdued. For the Republicans in the suite, resignation had taken root weeks, if not months, earlier, and had grown into a kind of worldly indifference, grounded in the half-sincere belief that our new President, be it Obama or McCain, would be no match for the havoc in the financial markets and the spiralling economic mess. It is a widely held view among the investor classes that no one in Washington has any clue how the world really works.

There were two full bars set up in the suite, one Democratic, one Republican. The former featured spiked Hawaiian punch and Tusker beer, from Kenya. The Republican bar served an assortment of Bordeaux: a conceit losing steam. The host had his guests put on campaign buttons, according to their allegiance. McCain buttons outnumbered Obama buttons, but not by many. There was a raw bar and mini-cheeseburgers and foie gras and, in most rooms, a large flat-screen television. The Republican room, tuned to Fox, was thick with smoke. The Democratic room--CNN--was bigger and better appointed, a provision that, as one guest later put it, "resonated of an aptly Confederate grace."

The host is an economically sophisticated, socially libertarian, temperamentally provocative, professionally eccentric kind of conservative--not in the Roosevelt or Rockefeller or Palin mold but in that of Strauss and Von Mises and Johnny Ramone. For the most part, his like-minded guests were not as afraid of Obama's inexperience or his liberalism or even of the prospect of higher taxes (as one hedge-fund manager, a Democrat who has had a miserable year, said, "I don't have any capital gains. I have capital losses. There isn't anything to tax") as they were of the Treasury's extreme improvidence and the broader national lurch toward populism. Certainly, they admired Obama's historic achievement and the message that it sent to the world. In their view, though, he is in for it, and so are we.

The returns started rolling in, but the guests paid them little mind. The TVs were muted. The guests, mostly in their forties, marvelled at the size of the Fed's balance sheet, rather than that of Obama's electoral ...