and 401(k)s on stocks, betting the ranch (or the ranch house it expects to inherit from its folks) on no-load mutuals, index funds, and 100 shares of Intel bought at . . . bought at the peak of the market, probably, but we’re in this for the long haul, right? We’re fans of the American economy. Rock and roll will be as a passing fad compared with the baby boom’s loyalty to growth-oriented investment planning. This is a big change. Something has happened to the huffy indignation that right-thinking people felt about getting rich during the “greedy Reagan years.” Finance has been famous before, and not long ago, but it played the heavy. There was the movie Wall Street with its Gordon Gekko, the hubris-oozing Masters of the Universe in Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities, and preppie hysteric Michael Lewis at Salomon Brothers taking notes for Liar’s Poker and tut-tutting about “big, swinging dicks.” In the modern-celebrity tradition, money making has re-created itself. It has acquired a new, burnished, lovable image—the way Richard Nixon did with years of post-Watergate statesmanship poses and Princess Di did with a car wreck. But we never really know these luminaries, do we? And nobody knows the stock market. The unpredictable rise and fall of stock prices prove it. Watching the market all the time doesn’t really help. When we see the moil and tumult on the exchange floor, we’re looking at something we aren’t seeing and seeing something that isn’t there. The something we aren’t seeing is, essentially, nothing. We think of stocks as being constantly bought and sold— 1,201,347,000 shares traded on October 28, 1997, the NYSE’s busiest day to date. But there are 207 billion shares registered on the New York Stock Exchange. In an absolute buying and selling frenzy, less than 0.6 percent of those shares changed hands. Investment usually stays invested. What we’re seeing that isn’t there is “a rush to get into the stock market” or “a panic to get out,” depending on the day. In a bull market we have an idea that stock is only being bought. Street people are cashing in their pop cans for a share of Microsoft. Dogs bring their bones to the stock exchange. In a crash we think stock is only being sold. The wealth of the nation has been converted into T-bills or Franklin Mint commemorative plates. But every share of stock that sells has a buyer. There are no stocks sitting empty with OPEN HOUSE ON SUNDAY signs out
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