Word: marketic
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...Mayer dissects the rebellion against Gordon Brown and the future of the Labour Party. Contributor David Van Biema takes an in-depth look at the Mormon Church, the fourth largest in America, and its current high-profile involvement in politics, while our business columnist Justin Fox explains why financial markets don't necessarily know best, a piece based on his new book, The Myth of the Rational Market...
More to the point, Fisher was the country's first great economist, a pioneer of the mathematical approach that came to dominate the discipline after his death. Fisher saw the behavior of the market in rational, mathematical terms. He wasn't completely doctrinaire about this--earlier in his career, he had allowed that investors sometimes behaved like sheep. But in the 1920s, convinced that skilled monetary management at the Federal Reserve and the rise of new, professionally run investment trusts had reduced the riskiness of markets, he lulled himself into believing that the prices prevailing on Wall Street were...
...what economists called the Great Moderation. An explosion of financial innovation was deemed to have provided investors, corporations and banks with new ways of managing risk. Prices of stocks, houses and other assets rose to levels that were high by historical standards--but who was to say the market was wrong in fixing those high values...
...1990s and 2000s, in fact, this myth of the rational market was embraced with a fervor that even Irving Fisher never mustered. Financial markets knew best, the thinking went. They spread risk. They gathered and dispersed information. They regulated global economic affairs with a swiftness and decisiveness that governments couldn't match. And then, as debt markets began to freeze up in 2007, suddenly markets didn't do any of these things. "The whole intellectual edifice collapsed in the summer of last year," former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan said at a congressional hearing in October...
Fisher fell on hard times after the 1929 crash--getting by thanks only to the generosity of a wealthy sister-in-law and his employer, Yale--and so did the myth of the rational market. For a few decades, financial markets were seen as unruly beasts that had to be tamed with tight regulation to help protect the hard-earned savings of regular Americans. But memories of the 1930s eventually faded, and in the 1950s, the idea that markets knew best began its comeback. This was part ideological reaction to the antimarket conventions of the day, part scientific progress...