One good thing about this election that benefits all Americans is that conservative rich people, especially bankers, who were holding onto their money out of fear of the Democrats will likely be empowered to spend and invest even if nothing concrete as changed to the law. Republican wins like this DO historically inspire investor confidence and that will lead to a slow but eventual clearing of all the stimulus money banks have been hoarding.
Banking/Finance doesn't quite work that way although not bad.
-All securities have to be owned by someone. If I invest by buying securities from someone else than they have to sell those securities to me. Granted this simplistically ignores new offerings, but still...
-Banks are always salivating to lend. They're not deploying their substantial cash reserves not out of fear, but instead because:
1) The implementation of Basel III capital ratios make bank capital expensive and bank liquidity (cash/deposits/etc.) cheap. By looking only at the latter and concluding they're holding that money back by choice misses a bigger picture of what is happening.
2) The financial world sees limited available opportunities for profitable lower risk lending because there is limited capacity for additional debt out there and those that do have capacity don't have that high of a demand for it.
Don't forget the 4 C's of credit: Character (Credit histories are only slowly improving), capacity (indebtedness/incomes are only slowly improving so the market sees limited capacity for debt), collateral (most collateral out there is already encumbered), Capital (reserves replenishing slowly).
