NOTICED:THE MARKET’S A BITCH
The people who like to tell me at parties that they never read the Style section are always the same people who tell me that the one section of the newspaper they never miss is the report on business. Style, they scoff, with its shallow focus on trends and appearances, is “just a re-named women’s section”. Whereas to these same three-button types, business is all serious, nuts-and-bolts “news you can use”— in their view, it’s the boy’s section.
All the brokers and bankers and traders fortunate enough to be in this boy’s club pride themselves on playing a man’s game because it involves risk and numbers. Even for the few women on the team, the talk verges on locker-room, the macho walk all about how big their hedge fund is. It is widely, if tacitly accepted that the manly business world, with its MBAs and projections and spreadsheets, works on practical, rational scientific principles rather than anything squishy—or, god forbid, intuitive or feminine. So I couldn’t resist a giggle on Martin Luther King Day, when widespread panic over the wildly fluctuating world stock markets made these swaggering dudes their bitch.
Just to recap: on the 19th of January, Frankfurt’s DAX index fell 7.2%, in its steepest decline since September 11, 2001. In Tokyo, the Nikkei faced its worst two-day drop in 17 years. No market was safe from the sell-off panic, which was all too reminiscent of big bad Black Monday, and has continued its scary slide since. That night on tv, analysts consulted for their professional opinions offered that part of the problem was that the Dow was closed to trading thanks to the US banking holiday—an admission, that when considered in another light, amounts to “there we were totally freaking out and then he didn’t call”.
Sorry guys, to have to break it to you, but the market is a woman. And since it takes one to know one, I can say that this particular female who has all the boys hog-tied in their tighty-whities, is displaying all the mercurial, inexplicable mood swings of the hormonally challenged. Think about it. If anything’s been in the driver’s seat the past couple of weeks, it’s a serious case of PMS. The market’s in free-fall, no—it’s rallying, or, then again maybe not. Now it wants to come back but it just can’t trust the Fed. Yes, we are talking full-on door-slamming, prone to fits of sudden rage and weeping, carb-craving and murderous thoughts here. Meanwhile, if men are from Mars and women are from Venus, the market is so Venusian in its wiles that it doesn’t even believe in the space program.
Lost as to how to handle a woman on the edge, the US President, that insensitive lout, thinks all it takes to improve her mood is a little shopping. What’s even worse, the banker boys still insist they can straighten her out by being rational.
My prescription for a higher understanding of the financial markets (and peace between the sexes)? For starters, how about we all admit forecasting the market is just about as sound a practice as auguring the future by reading the entrails of a slaughtered goat. And while we’re at it, what about opening up to this radical idea: that superficial and irrational as they may be, trends in style matter. Because everything—yes, even the ups and downs of the stock market– is based on appearances.
A friend who has flirted with Botox told me a story that sheds some light on this subject. Apparently the most transformative thing about getting Botox injections isn’t the way that you feel when you see your smoothed-out face in the mirror. In her experience, the biggest change it effects is in the way that others treat you. Since you suddenly appear to be calmer and less worried, others around you respond to you as if you actually were calmer and less worried (which makes a good case for Botox).
This could be a valuable insight—and not just for the people who hawk botulinum toxin. Why do we even care what we look like? Because appearances create their own reality. And just as with the present uncertainty in the market, all it takes is the mere perception of panic for it to become real.
Is it too late for world Botox? Are we heading into a recession or coming out of one? As even the geniuses in the world of finance must admit, it all depends on what it looks like. And sorry, boys, but what it looks like is just the stupid kind of girl stuff one reads in the Style section.