Trollope in the Stock Market: Irrational Exuberance and The Prime Minister

A television advertisement for CNBC, aired frequently before the late-2000 stock-market decline, features a digital stock ticker projected across the chest of a railway commuter, its numbers coursing around him in a continuous, moving ribbon (fig. 1). Like an EKG, or some new kind of medical tracking device, this image—locating the numbers where the man's other ticker would be— captures the contemporary fascination with the stock market by identifying the movement of stock prices with life itself: physical and, especially, emotional life. The ad evokes the fantasy of connectedness that the stock market has become, as it pictures this commuter surrounded by—in effect, bound up in—a complex arrangement of digits that must, it seems, signify something crucial about him. The band across his chest registering both the intensity and banality of today's incessant market monitoring, the man with the ticker is a new everyman, a more intriguing version of the familiar work-a-day commuter, his internalization of the market (and the admiring gaze of his fellow commuter) singling him out as an enviable type: a vision of how connected we may all someday hope to become. In an age of such heightened attention to stock prices that they can be identified as vital signs, the man with the ticker is our better, more tuned-in self; watching the numbers, the ad intimates, we are simply watching ourselves.

But how, exactly, are those signs to be read? In both popular and academic discourse, the movement of stock-market prices, especially as symbolized by the jagged line of the stock-market graph, is amenable both to interpretation and to the failure of interpretation: it looks so much like a narrative, and yet no one can say for certain what it means. Or rather, everyone has something to say: an encyclopedia of "chart patterns" lists forty-seven variations, with such engaging names as "bump and run reversal," "hanging man," and "dead-cat bounce." The book also includes a chart identifying its own "failure rate": "Percentage of formations that do not work as expected" (Bulkowski 655). A writer on day-trading cautions against selling on Mondays, with this caveat: "There is no pattern, relationship, or indicator in the market that will always be correct [...] Now, getting back to the Monday pattern" (Bernstein 71). Nor does the graph's much-vaunted unpredictability, or "failure rate," inhibit interpretation; if its trajectory fails to confirm expectations, as it frequently does, that failure tends to be rationalized by the idea that the market knows us better than we know ourselves: more "sensitive" than any individual human being, it is said to respond to "unpredictable human impulses" (Carret 24). Indeed, most frequently, as the CNBC image suggests, the line's trajectory is assimilated to a narrative of feeling: universally apprehended as a picture of emotions—a snapshot of the national (or global) mood—it is understood as swinging between (for example) elation and depression, optimism and alarm. Looking to the numbers to see how we feel, we both personalize them—render them a projection of our individual and collective narratives—and depersonalize them, conceding our authority to know ourselves to an abstract system that seems to have captured this knowledge. Do the numbers emerge from within the man's chest, or are they projected from without? Is the market a projection of the man, or is the man a projection of the market? Making sense of the numbers, we seek to discover, in that familiar phrase that registers the identification of economic with emotional well-being, how we are doing.

The market must have some authority of its own, it seems—it can't be just us, writ large, and yet it appears to be. The idea of the stock market as emotional projection bears on the question, addressed by market theorists, of whether stock prices are determined by facts about companies or...