Wall Street has taken to thinking in terms of walls. There is a “wall of money” waiting to tumble down on stock markets and into corporate investments if only investors could climb the “wall of worry” constructed by America’s politicians who can’t seem to put the nation’s finances in order.

There is little doubt that investors are sitting on the sidelines behind a wall of money. Corporations are hoarding billions here and abroad as they wait for some signal that the politicians can govern sensibly, and for some indication of the regulatory and health care costs they will face from Obamacare and Dodd-Frank. Nor is there any doubt that businessmen and consumers are facing what they see as a wall of worry or, more precisely of worries. To adapt Claudius’s lament, “When worries come, they come in battalions, the people muddied and unwholesome in their thoughts.” Some of these worries are justified, others are not.