The election of Barack Obama as the next U.S. president creates plenty of profit plays for investors in the New Year. By Martin Hutchinson Contributing Editor Money Morning/The Money Map Report With his landslide election victory Tuesday - coupled with Democratic gains in the House of Representatives and in the Senate - U.S. President-elect Barack Obama will have the ability to pursue more or less any policy he wants. For investors who have been trying to analyze the economic outlook for the New Year, the election of U.S. Sen. Obama (D-Ill.) provides a major piece of the forward-looking jigsaw puzzle that these analysts hope to assemble. That’s because the likely trends of the United States and other economies around the world - and the relative success of different sectors within those economies - depends crucially on who’s in the White House, what policies they have, and ...

Will November’s emergency global financial summit result in a “new global financial order”? European leaders are pressing for a fundamental change in the US-centric monetary system. Jason Simpkins says a similar crisis meeting in 1944 gave birth to the Bretton Woods gold standard. But there are reasons to doubt such a major reform this time around.

This from Money Morning:

The leaders of 20 of the world’s most developed nations, the G20, will convene in Washington D.C. on Nov. 15 for an emergency financial summit considered by many to be the 21st century version of the Bretton Woods initiative of 1944. This will be the first chance for European leaders – many of whom blame the current financial contagion on U.S. free market capitalism run – to press for an overhaul of a global financial system the United States has dominated for more than 60 years.

The summit will

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