Over the course of the last year the Dow has lost 35 per cent of its value, amounting to trillions of dollars. Newspapers here in the States are peppered with references to the market 'cratering', a bleak term that for me conjures the desolate, lifeless landscape of the moon. A friend suggested another interpretation: 'A crater — it's what's left after a massive explosion.'
Which is funny, because to me our situation has none of the immediacy or clarity of an explosion. It turns out the idea of a 'stock market crash' is a misnomer. Things don't happen all at once. Anything but.
First the mortgages, then the banks, then industry ... it's the slow-motion collapse of a building, floor by floor, or the implosion of a web, a broken strand in one section causing undue pressure and breaks in altogether different and hard to predict areas.
While we in the States were caught up with evaluating our $850 billion bailout, the European banks began to wobble significantly. Today the conventional wisdom is that only by working together internationally can we address the crises we face. And even after we begin to do that, the market tumbles.
Everywhere in the news we hear of the 'panic'. Yet as I walk through the streets of Manhattan these days, things seem much the same as always. Passersby brusque as ever, pushing their way down the sidewalks, irrespective of signals or other pedestrians. Vendors selling ice cream and hot dogs on street corners. The sirens of police cars sounding in the distance. Tourists wandering through midtown hand in hand, off to see a show or wonder at the nighttime pulse of Times Square, while failed or failing investment firms stand unseen all around them.
I'm not sure what that points to, that odd disconnection between physical and financial realities. And the mind plays funny tricks in the gaps, seeks consistency or a narrative where maybe there is none.
A newspaper box on a street corner, the papers within a week old. Has the paper abandoned it because of the financial crisis? The New York Times, the United States' premier newspaper, recently announced it was merging a few sections. Was this long in the works, or a consequence of the last few weeks?
Suddenly everything is about the crisis, even that which isn't. I saw tourists in Central