Upstairs from the trading floor is the New York Stock Exchange Luncheon Club, looking the way that something to do with the stock market should look. The ceilings are lofty, the windows are Palladian, and the help is obsequious. The leather armchairs are wide and deep. The china is monogrammed. The stalls in the men’s room are made of marble. And all day long the New York Stock Exchange Luncheon Club is empty. David hasn’t eaten there in seven years. The traders gobble take-out food, standing up, and not just because they have too much work. They’re in the groove. They’re wholly absorbed in what they’re doing. They’re lost in total concentration on the market or on one segment of that market. In the middle of the afternoon, I mentioned to David that the Dow Jones average was down a hundred points. He’d had no idea. He hadn’t bothered to look. The traders spend their day in that eerie, perfect state the rest of us achieve only sometimes when we’re playing sports, having sex, gambling, or driving fast. Think of traders as doing all those things at once, minus perhaps the sex. The great surprise of the stock market is that it’s a happy place—not only happy in a bull season, when everybody’s making money, but also happy, in its way, when everything is falling apart. All free markets are mysterious in their behavior, but the New York Stock Exchange contains a mystery I never expected—transcendent bliss. The New York Stock Exchange does $23 billion in business on an average day. Five times a week it buys and sells an amount of stuff equal to the annual gross domestic product of Tanzania. The NYSE is the world’s largest clearinghouse for corporate shares, but there are plenty of other big stock markets. The American Stock Exchange, a block away, trades 6 billion shares a year. The stock of newer, smaller, or less-illustrious corporations—more than 5,500 of them—is bought and sold in the Over-the-Counter market. Here the hollering and wearing of ugly clothes take place across a network of computer terminals and phone lines—the National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotation system, or NASDAQ. There are regional stock exchanges in Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and San Francisco. Most capitalist countries (and some communist nations such as China) have stock exchanges. More than $19.4 trillion worth of stocks was traded worldwide in 1997.
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