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One of my conservative friends remarked yesterday that the Dow's 4% decline should be chalked up to the market's fear of an Obama presidency. I could go at this statement on so many levels. I instead went looking for the historical context of yesterday's performance.

David Gaffen at MarketBeat looked at the Dow's inauguration day performance since 1937 (excluding Obama, his article was published yesterday afternoon), the year inauguration was moved to Jan. 20th. He concluded that "the day of the inauguration has historically been a lousy one for the Dow Jones Industrial Average." He found that out of the past 10 inaugural days, just 2 ended higher for the Dow (85 and 97). The worst day? The Gipper's 1980 inauguration.

So if recent history is any indication, Obama had little to do with yesterday's decline. It was instead driven by a heavy sell-off in financials, which speaks more to the Bush administration's utter failure to address the fundamental problems in the banking sector and place a floor under the US housing market.