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    • Do party politics influence investors? Maybe -- maybe not. The S&P 500 (GSPC) has gained more than 62 percent since President Obama took office in 2009, and despite losses last week, the S&P is still up 11 percent year-to-date. Even with these advances, a majority of money managers and investment strategists would prefer a Republican president, according to a recent poll by CNNMoney. Seventy percent of those surveyed want a leadership change although markets have historically fared better during a Democratic administration.

      For Bob Doll, chief equity strategist at BlackRock, the most important factor for markets right now is not necessarily who will win the White House but rather direction from Washington on budget and tax policies — regardless if it comes from a Democrat or Republican.

      "Markets and business folk…hate the uncertainty of all these temporary measures," Doll says in an interview with The Daily Ticker. But "the probability is near zero that politicians will do anything meaningful before the election."

      According to Doll, the probability of a recession in the U.S. increases in 2013 if Congress and the White House cannot agree on a sound fiscal policy that resolutely tackles both entitlement spending and the Bush-era tax cuts. U.S. political risk is a "wildcard" for his positive market outlook: Politicians should extend or re-design the Bush tax cuts that are set to expire in December because not doing so would have "significant negative effects for the U.S. economy and financial markets," he writes in a recent investor note. Doll says the scheduled $600 billion defense and domestic discretionary cuts that resulted from the bipartisan Super Committee's failure to reach a debt deal will also adversely impact stocks.

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    • The stock market is having its first chance to respond to Friday's disappointing jobs report and the results are predictable: In recent trading, the Dow was down 105 points while the S&P 500 was lower by 1%, albeit off its worst lows of the day (so far).

      Bob Doll, chief equity strategist for fundamental equities at BlackRock, says a 5% to 7% pullback "would not be out of the ordinary," given the jobs report following the market's huge rally since the October lows.

      "We could have a consolidation here, which would be very much overdue in some sense," he says, noting the market was "acting a little tired" even prior to last week's selloff.

      Doll, whose firm oversees about $3.5 trillion in assets, believes investors would be wise to buy the dip. "I'd advise people not to be faint of heart and on the pullback do some buying," he says, citing healthcare (notably healthcare services) and cyclicals (notably energy and tech) as his favorite sectors.

      Predicting major averages have not yet hit

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    • In his latest book, Finance and the Good Society, Yale Professor Robert Shiller takes a view that runs contrary to the popular (and populist) wisdom these days: Wall Street is good for society.

      "This time in history will be remembered as a time financial capitalism took over the world," Shiller says. "A time when emerging countries became developed. The plan we're on is going to yield a remarkable world in the future. It's really about finance."

      According to Shiller, no nation can truly prosper without modern financial institutions. Furthermore, "we have to think the financial institutions we have today are part of a long historic progress to a better world, a better civilization."

      Given all that's transpired since the crisis of 2008 — huge payouts for executives at faltering banks, taxpayer-funded bailouts and a slow recovery from deep recession — it's fair to say Shiller is in the minority on this, at least among those willing to speak publicly.

      But Shiller is no apologist for Wall Street excess and understands the Occupy Wall Street movement arose, in part, because of a sense "people in the financial community lost [their] morality."

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    • Every day, Michelle Leder and the crew at Footnoted.com come through Securities and Exchange Commission filings in search of illuminating news and nuggets from corporate America. Every month she joins us to discuss some of the highlights — and lowlights — in executive compensation. March came in like a lion — with hefty compensation packages for CEOs at old school blue-chip companies like McDonald's, IBM, Sears, and at newbies like Zynga.

      Supersize Send-off at McDonald's. For some employees, McDonald's remains the Golden Arches. In late March, Jim Skinner, the chief executive officer of the vast restaurant chain, announced he would retire after more than seven years running the company. And his sending off will include a package that should keep him in Happy Meals for years to come. Footnoted.com's sleuths combed through the complicated disclosures to calculate Skinner's going-away package. "Our final, back-of-the-envelope tally: a minimum of $82.3 million for retirement." This may be the rare instance in which shareholders may not grumble about a rich retirement package. Skinner spent nearly 40 years at the company. And as this five-year chart shows, the stock performed remarkably well under his stewardship.

      IBM's Palmisano Equation. It may sound like the name of a Big Bang Theory episode. But it's really the effort to tally the retirement package of former IBM CEO Sam Palmisano, whose nine-year stint at the head of Big Blue came to a fruitful close last year. As Footnoted found, the compensation is so complicated you need a mainframe to crunch all the data. But Palmisano, who joined the company in 1973, is being amply rewarded for his nearly four decades of labor: $91.9 million in stock options he's accumulated but hasn't exercised, $22.5 million from a "retention plan," a supplemental executive retirement plan ($34 million) and some $68.6 million that had built up in a deferred-compensation account. All in, "when Palmisano ultimately leaves IBM, he's very likely to receive a package of cash and stock of $224.7 million, using December 31, 2011, data." Here's a five-year chart of the company's stock.

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