The paralysing wait between the election of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 and his inauguration four months later was the most dangerous point of the Great Depression. It saw policy drift in Washington and the era's last disastrous wave of bank failures.

This will not happen again. The interegnum has been reduced to two months. The campaign machinery of Barack Obama is the most disciplined in US political history. The transition is being run by John Podesta, a former White House chief of staff who remembers how the Clinton team squandered weeks in Little Rock before starting to assemble a government.

Mr Obama knows he has no such luxury in this fast-moving crisis. He takes over a country that is now losing almost half a million jobs a month, and may soon lose much of its car industry.

The budget deficit is likely to reach $1.2 trillion (&…