What better week to tackle fear and greed in the stock market? Under the shadow of global financial meltdown, this episode explores the nature of cognition in the markets: how market actors see, choose and act. Moving from the model of homo oeconomicus in the efficient market to the irrational animal spirits of behavioural economics, I find neither satisfactory, and explore an alternative, sociological concept of decision: that it is distributed across social and technical networks. We revisit the non-professional investor, and find that a distributed model of decision making can help us understand their sometimes idiosyncratic actions. *Updated with postscript!*
TRANSCRIPTION
Well, it’s been quite a week in the markets, hasn’t it. The old saying has it that when Wall Street sneezes, the world catches a cold. It is probably in bad taste to observe that it is not Wall Street doing the sneezing, not yet at least, and that the rest of the world is doing its very best to avoid colds and much worse. Unless you have been living on Mars you will have noticed that there is a global pandemic on the way and that, as well as shutting down everyday life for an increasing chunk of the world’s population, it is playing havoc with industrial production in China, and, thanks to global supply chains, business everywhere else. Amazingly it took until the middle of last week for Goldman Sachs to point out that the wildfire spread of COVID-19 across the globe might damage US earnings – important to stick to consequences that matter – and already nervous stock markets collapsed. As did Flybe, the UK regional airline, already once rescued by the government, with other travel firms sure to follow. The Federal Reserve’s move to cut interest rates had little effect, the screens are bathed in red; money managers are working long nights and shoppers are hoarding loo rolls. What better week to discuss greed and fear – what Keynes famously called ‘animal spirits’ – in the stock market?
But are we so irrational after all? And is that even the right question?
Hello, and welcome to How to Build a Stock Exchange. My name is Philip Roscoe and I am a sociologist interested in the world of finance. I teach and research at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, though I’m on strike quite a lot of the time at the moment, squeezing these episodes out in the odd day back at the desk. Anyway, to business: I want to build a stock exchange. Why? Because, when it comes to finance, what we have just isn’t good enough. If you’ve been following this podcast – and if so thank you – you’ll know that I’ve been talking about how financial markets really work, and how they became so important. I’ve been deconstructing markets: the wires, and screens, the buildings, the politics, the relationships, the historical entanglements that make them go, all in the hope of helping you understand how and why finance works as it does. As well as these, I’ve been looking at the stories we tell about the stock market. You might be surprised how much power stories have had on the shape and influence of financial markets, from Daniel Defoe to Ayn Rand. I’m trying to grasp the almost post-modern nature of finance, post-modern long before the term was invented, the fact that finance is, most of all, a story. Start-ups are stories, narratives of future possibility; shares and bonds are promises based on narratives of stability and growth. Even money is a story, circulating relations of trust written into banknotes, credit cards and accounts. Stories set the tone, make the rules, determine what counts and what does not. A good stock market needs a good story, so if we’re serious about rebuilding financial institutions then we need to take control of those stories.
This episode is about how people see and do in the market: how they think and how they choose.