Now we know. It will be Hillary Rodham Clinton vs. Donald J. Trump only some seven months from now, when election day arrives and puts a merciful end to our elongated campaign season. The winner will inherit an economy that, in all probability, will be continuing its slow crawl, with growth at or somewhat below an annual rate of 2 percent. Or less, if the possibility of a Trump presidency rattles the denizens of the nation’s board rooms into stalling any planned investments until they can be certain that the polls are right, and that voters will return The Donald to his Trump Tower penthouse rather than give him the keys to the White House. Remember: among other Trump ideas is to give holders of US Treasury bonds “a haircut”—reducing the value of their government bonds so as to reduce the national debt. A presidential candidate who sees the IOUs of the US government as akin to those of Argentina, Puerto Rico, and to the companies he has taken into bankruptcy, is not going to persuade our corporations to build the next factory or increase R&D spending.

The steady mud-slinging that is already under way will not morph into full-blown election campaigns until after the party conventions this summer formally anoint the winners of the recent primary battles. Both candidates carry heavy baggage and are widely disliked. Clinton is seen by a majority of voters as dishonest, Trump as a misogynist bigot. Both will begin campaigning in an economy that most probably will be growing at its current moderate rate, unless some “event, dear boy,” (the thing former British prime minister Harold Macmillan said he feared the most) in the Middle East, the South China Sea, or Eastern Europe tips us into recession. Or billionaire trader Stanley Druckenmiller is right that conditions at home so closely resemble those in the period before the 2008 financial crisis that we are on an “ephemeral sugar high” of low interest rates, to be followed by another recession.