Whoever awakens as Prime Minister on Sunday morning will face a very different world than the one they confronted the night before.
Gone will be all the guff, puff and grandiloquent statements of the campaign and the celebrations of election victory.
Events elsewhere, especially in the US, will be dictating policy, especially for financial markets.
The above graph shows how the US dollar and yield on the benchmark 10 year US treasury bond have been moving down together: the bond yield falling as investors sought safety away from volatile share and credit markets; the greenback falling because of that volatility and its impact on US economic growth.
Americans are celebrating Thanksgiving today and it's a long weekend for most people in the US. It's also a time of heightened tensions in the markets because of the small trading windows.
That's why US interest rates fell to their lowest level since 2005: many investors wanted to be in bonds and in safety. Cash? Well, it is kept in banks and many are on suspicion at the moment
For all our talk of boom, rising exports and interest rates, the reality after the election will be the increasing fragility of world financial markets: not the strength of the Australian economy.
The US Federal Reserve used the phrase "adverse shock" in commentary on the fragility of US financial markets this week. That fragility extends from Wall Street to the US economy and beyond.
It is no longer a question of 'Australia will survive' any fallout from a US slowdown because we are tied into the still growing and booming Chinese economy.
It is not just a question about gross domestic product and economic growth: they are subsidiary issues. It's the fragility of the US financial system, where credit is manufactured and loans made and economic growth created. It is also about the value of the US dollar.
The bottom line in US commentary every day goes to this question: how stable are the banks, the hedge funds, the major investors in things in addition to mortgages? The questions are being asked in Britain which is rapidly sliding towards recession, the rest of Europe which is slowing, and even booming Asia is growing concerned.
On four separate occasions this week senior Chinese figures, from the Governor of the Central Bank, to the Premier, Wen Jiabao, have warned about the impact of the sliding US dollar on China's reserves of foreign exchange, the Chinese economy, exports, and the value of the currency.
Middle East and Opec members are becoming restless at the slide in the value of the US dollar: they get paid in weakening US dollars and buy billions of dollars worth of products, equipment and services from Europe where the euro is at record highs. Inflation is gathering pace in the Gulf (with oil near $US100 a barrel, that's no coincidence).
For political reasons some Opec members are lobbying to diversify away from the US dollar as a reserve currency, just as there's low level agitation in China where there's $US1.43 trillion in reserves losing value every day.
The US dollar is sliding not because of the prospect of more interest rate cuts and a slowing economy. (In a normal slowdown the dollar could be on the turn as foreign investors position themselves for the upturn). Its the fear of not fully knowing and understanding what is happening in credit markets in particular.
No one knows when the upturn will come; the housing slump is dragging the rest of the economy into a hole (with the exception of the export sector like John Deere, the big equipment company which reported good earnings this week because of a sharp rise in exports).
It is a remorseless: the subprime mortgage mess, the housing slide and the credit collapse in the US are greasing the slide.
Overnight Wednesday the National group for US real estate agents released figures showing that home prices fell in one third of US cities last quarter because stricter lending standards caused a 14% slide in sales across the country.
The National Association of Realtors said house prices dropped in 54 of 150 metropolitan areas in the third quarter and the national median sales price fell 2%. Home sales, including single-family properties and condominiums (flats and units), slid to an annual rate of 5.42 million, down 14% from the third quarter of 2006.
The Association said the fall in sales and prices is signalling the increasing chance the housing slump, that began in 2006, will extend into a third year and match the one 18 years ago that pulled the US into recession in 1991.
The US dollar is falling because of the growing concerns about the credit-worthiness of mostly US financial groups.
Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, Lehman Bros, Bear Stearns, Bank America, UBS, Barclays and a host of other big names are on a 'suspicion watch' by each other and outsiders who all wonder if there's a bomb in their balance sheets waiting to go off.
These big banks and financial groups create credit everyday for everyone from Exxon to a small businessman and home buyer. They help raise and refinance debt for people in other countries. That credit creation is slowing because of rising risk aversion, fear about financial failure and a run down of capital caused by the growing losses and write-downs.
It's why any crunch or failure in the US financial system will create more problems than a slowdown in the broader US economy.
A key financing market in Europe for mortgages, the $US2.8 trillion so called covered bonds market, was ordered shutdown by the banks that run it because buy-sell spreads had effectively stopped activity. This is the refinancing mechanism for Europe's growing home mortgage markets (http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601009&sid=aTCTOhu0Jxk8&refer=bond). The news will hit Britain hard where signs
