With Bersani winning a majority in the Italian Chamber of Deputies, but no party winning an outright majority in the Senate, the result is a hung parliament.
At the time of my writing this post around noon EST on Tuesday, Italy's stock market closed down 799.79 points (-4.89%), and European, Asian, Indian and other world markets are down, as shown below...hardly surprising as world markets have pulled back slightly from their (overbought) four-year highs.
We'll see where world markets (and institutional confidence) go from here, in the short term, as they analyze potential effects on their global investments, and as final election results become known in more detail. If Italy does, indeed, have a hung parliament, the EU and ECB will, once again, have to swing into damage-control mode, putting them in a "defensive" stance...hardly conducive to support pushing (and, more importantly, convincingly sustain) European markets higher above their recent four-year highs.
