From Bloomberg News:

Mexico's wealthiest person lost $5.1 billion in the wake of Donald Trump's stunning upset over Democratic rival Hillary Clinton. Carlos Slim, who is fifth-richest in the world, shed 9.2 percent of his fortune after the peso dove as much as 12 percent on the news.

What the Bloomberg article doesn't mention is that (as I reported back in September):

as of March 7, 2016, Carlos Slim Helu, of Mexico, controlled 17.4 percent of New York Times company stock, or 27,803,000 shares. At today's prices, that's worth about $344 million.

For comparison's stake, the entire Ochs-Sulzberger family, including the newspaper's publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., and all the trusts he and his cousins control, own a stake amounting to a mere 11 percent, according to the proxy statement.

Here are some post-election reasons to be optimistic, even if, like me, you have had or still have your reservations about Donald Trump:

Trump the tax-cutter. If taxes are headed in a direction, it's downward, rather than upward, both at the corporate and the personal levels. That should be good for economic growth and for prosperity. Trump campaigned as a tax cutter, and part of Hillary Clinton's reason for losing is she had no corporate tax reduction proposal and no one believed her pledge not to raise taxes on anyone earning $250,000 a year or less.

As you can tell from some of my recent work — "A President-Elect Hillary Might Miss Justice Scalia," or "The Post-Trump GOP" — I got the ending of this election wrong. So did lots of other people on the coasts who relied on polls, though that is no excuse. Some other pieces I wrote held up better (Five Ways Trump Could Win, from August 13).

But overall it is a fail. Rabbi Elie Kaunfer, a Harvard pal of mine who now runs a yeshiva in Manhattan, asked on Facebook this morning, "What else are we totally convinced of yet are 100% wrong about?"

It brings up talk of Kaelism — the phenomenon named for the New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael, who supposedly reacted to President Nixon's election by wondering how it was possible, since she didn't personally know a single person who had voted for him.

"Crooked" Hillary is no reason to revive the independent counsel statute, I write in my column this week. Please check it out at the New Boston Post (here), New York Sun (here), Reason (here), and Newsmax (here). (After my column posted, William McGurn weighed in with a similar piece in the Wall Street Journal that is also worth a look.)

It's the regulation that causes the corruption, I write in my Sunday Las Vegas Review-Journal column, which looks at how many of the Clinton Foundation donors and Teneo clients mentioned in the Douglas Band Wikileaks memo had business interests subject to government interference. Please check the column out here.

David Brooks had a recent New York Times column making the case for Hillary Clinton for president. It included this argument, which was a new one to me:

Clinton was at her best in the Senate. ... Her accomplishments — post-9/11 funding for New York, saving Army bases in upstate New York — were concrete.

There may be good reasons to support Hillary Clinton for president, but this strikes me as a really weak argument. First of all, there were plenty of other people — Michael Bloomberg, Senator Schumer, Governor Pataki, George W. Bush, and Nita Lowey come to mind, and there may be others, too — who played just as important a role, probably more important, in winning post 9/11 funding for New York. If winning post 9/11 funding were an achievement that makes it worth voting for someone for president, why Clinton rather than Schumer, Pataki, or Bloomberg? Plenty of that funding went to basically corporate welfare for projects and companies that weren't particularly adversely affected by September 11, anyway.

A fine (or terrible, depending on how you look at it) example of how journalists and journalism shape perception of reality by using the technique of "framing" comes in today's New York Times business section, which carries a dispatch from Noam Scheiber about an employee who was apparently fired by a Trader Joe's food store.

From the Times article:

Mr. Nagle's filing challenges policies that appear in the Trader Joe's crew handbook and job bulletins, and which were read aloud to him. One of the latter required employees to maintain a "positive attitude."

Last month got kind of busy and I missed posting a link to this column I wrote. It appeared under the headline, "Think college is expensive now? Wait till Clinton makes it 'free.'" You can read it by clicking here.

The election — and possibly the next four or eight years — is shaping up as a contest between Crooked Hillary and Saint Hillary. My column this week explains. Please check the column out at the New Boston Post (here), New York Sun (here), Reason (here), and Newsmax (here).

Hillary Clinton's phony promise not to raise taxes on anyone earning $250,000 a year or less is the topic of my column in Sunday's Las Vegas Review-Journal. It's one of my better columns, if I do say so myself, so please check it out by clicking here.

The New York Times editor's insulting of CNN is the topic of my latest article for Heat Street, which you can read here.

The Lincoln Review, which is a Massachusetts-based podcast hosted by Jeff Semon and Ed Lyons, had me as a guest this week. It runs nearly an hour and we get into some long-range issues beyond the political news of the day. You can listen here. It was recorded in a Boston bar somewhat late at night, and I was eating french fries and keeping one eye on the World Series game in progress, but my (admittedly limited) understanding of podcasts is that they are a little more casual than, say, a cable television appearance. I enjoyed the conversation.

The governor of Massachusetts, Charlie Baker, his support for a ballot initiative to lift the limit on the number of charter schools in the state, and what he describes as his commitment to "fact-based and civil discourse" are the topic of an article I wrote that appears in the Boston Herald. It reports on Mr. Baker's appearance in New York at a breakfast of the Manhattan Institute. Please check the article out here.

What would the Republican Party look like after a Trump loss? My Sunday Las Vegas Review-Journal column takes a look at the possibilities and tensions. Please check it out here.

Libertarian (or classical liberal) law professor Richard Epstein has an open letter to Donald Trump up at the Hoover Institution web site.