After months of election hype and angst, next week we should know who the next president and Congress will be. What then? 

A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece on what the election means for investors’ portfolios. Longer term, the answer was not much. Shorter term, there’s potential for market volatility, but the fundamental fact is that the U.S. economy should continue to grow, and financial markets—and investors—should continue to benefit from that growth.

Now that both parties have nailed down their presidential nominees, it’s time to take a quick look at politics and how it may affect the economy and markets this year. As usual, we’ll focus on the policies that the two candidates have offered and their likely consequences.

Recently, several people have asked me what investors should do in their portfolios to prepare for the presidential election. One went so far as to contemplate going to cash around August, just in case.

The Indiana primaries giveth, and the Indiana primaries taketh away.

On the one hand, after Donald Trump’s victory there pushed both Ted Cruz and John Kasich out of the race, we now know who the Republican nominee will almost certainly be. On the other hand, Bernie Sanders’s victory extends the Democrats’ primary process further. Although Hillary Clinton remains the overwhelming favorite, that race isn’t over yet.

In case you’ve forgotten, the Treasury Department has said that, as of November 3 (that’s five days from now), it will no longer have the money to pay all the bills that come due. That could lead to a U.S. default on its obligations, which could be a big deal.

Fortunately, Washington has now taken a step toward a solution.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a major trade agreement among 12 countries, including most of the major economic powers in Asia, along with the U.S.—but notably excluding China. After five years of negotiations, the participating parties reached accord on October 5, and the agreement is now working its way toward approval in the various national legislatures. But is the TPP a good idea?

Sometimes, I really hate being right. A few weeks ago, I wrote that the Washington, DC, political environment had deteriorated and that the current go-round on the debt ceiling was likely to be even more contentious than the last one, two years ago. Sure enough, with the resignation of Speaker John Boehner—and the withdrawal yesterday of his heir apparent—the House appears ungovernable. Without some type of Republican internal agreement on at least whom to elect as speaker, it’s hard to see any resolution to the debt ceiling debate, which is likely going to hit in the next couple of weeks.

It was almost two years ago that I wrote “Here we go again” about the pending government shutdown. Well, here we go again—again—as a shutdown looks increasingly likely.

One of my favorite Sherlock Holmes stories centers around something that did not happen: a dog that did not bark when he should have. I was thinking about that story last night during the Republican presidential debates.

It wasn’t just the debates that recalled the story to me, but also how they were reported—lots of words on how Trump and Fiorina interacted; lots of words on how Bush played off Trump’s “low energy” comments. There was essentially nothing about the economy. Why not?