Stock market rises after election shifts; ECU professor says gridlock boosts confidence

Election day has come and gone, but the impacts of last nights’ decisions carries on. Including the stock market, which rose following the political changes across the country.

News 12 spoke with an ECU assistant professor, who walked us through why this wasn’t exactly an unexpected result following election night.

There’s been a lot of uncertainty especially with tariff’s, the Iran war and all of those.

Dr. Connor Kasten is an assistant professor of finance at ECU.

For most people, and I think it kinda goes with voters as well, people don’t like massive sweeping changes, and they don’t like not knowing what next month holds.

Changes like we saw across the nation.

With Democrats now leading in the House and Senate, but a Republican president in place, Dr. Kasten tells me its common to see that boost in the market.

One of the things that investors value is stability and certainty… If they kind of looked at Washington and are like alright– it’s going to be kind of gridlocked for the next two years, probably not much is getting done, so there’s a little bit more certainty in the market, so you typically see a bit of a bump.

He says that it is impossible to predict what exactly the future holds, but that based on historic data, investors can predict moderate growth for within the market.

If we can kind of get inflation in check, that coupled with some growth advantages from AI< I figure we will see a—uh, kind of just sticking with the course if you will, in terms of returns.

Overall, he says investors don’t expect any crazy changes moving forward within the market, instead moderate returns with plenty of opportunity for change.