A good rundown comes courtesy of Pragmatic Capitalism’s Cullen Roche:

• A deal was actually finalized. That’s good news. It looked like we might actually go into January without a deal and that the odds of no deal at all were rising.
• No one really won here. Congress is totally dysfunctional.
• There’s still a lot unanswered.

So it’s Rally Time, but only sort of. Asian stock markets were up sharply, but that was at last partly down to the latest positive PMI data from China. In London, the Footsie — much more of a barometer for the US — was up 1.5 per cent or so at pixel.

The fate of US negotiations to avert the fiscal cliff were thrown into turmoil after efforts by Republican leaders in the House of Representatives to pass their back-up plan to avert most of the tax hikes collapsed amid a conservative backlash.

But we recently came across a series of useful and well-constructed charts from Credit Suisse, and we wanted to highlight a couple of them:

– Ben Bernanke, first usage of “fiscal cliff”, 29 Feb 2012 (Hat tip Kevin Drum)

The problem was that Romney was suggesting it as a way to help make his proposal to lower tax rates pay for itself, ie to be ‘revenue-neutral’ in the jargon. But there was no way to do that just by lowering deductions: the tax cuts were too big, and Romney never really explained just how he would offset them.

Macro-strategist Michael Hampden-Turner has some thoughts on this — the $600bn “fiscal cliff” — which he shared with us on Wednesday morning (video below).

After US elections on November 6, Washington’s focus will shift to the fiscal cliff. The outgoing Congress will meet for another two months in what is traditionally called the ‘lame duck’ session.