DON'T ALTER YOUR BREATHING

Well, it's the morning after the day American voters scurried to the polls.

Most of the votes are counted and whatever message voters had to send has been sent. Some of the areas expected to gather more attention are energy, corporate taxes, immigration and trade. One area of energy that won't make the greenies happy is the long-stalled Keystone XL pipeline.

The long tax reach of that big Washington octopus has for some time grated against many corporations that do overseas business is another that won't sit well with the tax and spend crowd.

But don't get flustered. There's another election just over the horizon. The spending on that one should surely give the economy a boost.

Over in Europe the Brussels bureaucrats sent some shivers toward Magic Mario Draghi and his ECB banking crew.

Cutting its economic outlook for The EU, the European Commission tighten the garrote on Drahi and crew to do something, calling the EU economy "particularly weak" especially when compared to other developed countries. 

Citing the danger that the slowdown could become self-feeding, they downgraded the growth prospects for the two largest economies, Germany and France, for 2015. To so-called economic seers, the only book that matters in the Book of Revisions.

Here are the results: They cut Germany's expected GDP growth from last May's number, 2 percent, to 1.1 and France's from 1.5 to 0.7percent. And as if that isn't dire enough, particularly given France's noted intransigence against fiscal probity,The Financial Times quoted Pierre Moscovici, Brussels' new economic minister:

"Fiscal consolidation is a  necessity. But the question which is in front of us is how to recreate in the European project."

That's a question he might want to ask the Marine Le Pen followers in France and British Prime Minister David Cameron and the Ukipers in England among others.

It was a pathetic concept based on a flimsy premise that after the initial novelty wore off kept getting flimsier. The idea was conceived more in the bowels of academic idealism than in those of reality.

Hope is what it is. But when two of your largest economies, France and Italy, are historic freeloaders, expecting them to suddenly kick the habit over some hasty drawn, bureaucrat-laden-convoluted rules is beyond silly. It's pitiful. 

The whole thing had the smell of a room full of measles syndrome. Those weaker, undisciplined sibling peripherals, if we just let them hang out with us for a while, they'll catch the drift.

Well, don't alter your breathing over it any time soon.