Yesterday (Monday, September 20, 2004), E. S. Browning (Staff Reporter of the Wall Street Journal) wrote a very interesting article entitled “As Bush Goes, So Goes Market”.  He basically makes many of the same points which I made on Saturday, September 11 in my entry entitled “Update on the relationship between stock market returns and presidential futures returns“; i.e., that the presidential futures contracts appear to be pointing to a Bush victory this coming November, and that the stock market appears to be responding favorably.  Or does the direction of causality move in the opposite direction?; i.e., as the stock market improves, this implies that investors are more confident about the economy’s future prospects which which in turn improves the electoral prospects of the incumbent president (as reflected in futures prices).  Professors Naveen Khanna and Jennifer Brooke Marietta-Westberg (both finance professors at Michigan State University) make the latter (rather compelling) argument in their paper entitled “Is it ‘Kerry up, Market Down’ or ‘Market Down, Kerry up?’ Correlation versus Causation“.