? you might be interested to read a brief article in the latest print (dead-tree) edition of National Review.

Kevin A. Hassett compiles a chart that plots a country?s ?financial-market freedom? ? as measured by the Fraser Institute?s Economic Freedom of the World index ? and the change in its stock performance during the past year.

Assigning the ?deregulation and conservative ideology? thesis to our president-elect, Hassett finds the following:

If Obama?s thesis is correct, then the economic crisis should be worse in the countries that have looser regulations fueled by a ?failed ideology.?

The data show the exact opposite. ?

The fitted line [on the chart] is a regression line that captures the basic tendency of the data. If Obama were correct, the line would slope downward, and countries that are economically free would have had bigger collapses in their stock markets. In fact, the line is upward-sloping, which implies that over the past year, countries that are economically free have suffered less than countries that are not.

For more on the president-elect and his potential response to the economic crisis, see this recent John Hood Daily Journal.