A new entry in the Words & Pics series describing “illusion” as a key driver of the stock market activity.
As in no other formulation used in the stock market, this reflects a transformation of an uncertain future into a pessimism-resistant level of hope and action with high expectations of profit and salvation. To put it casually, a primarily socio-economically experienced crisis thus experiences its flotation in the direction of profitable future prospects with a high promise of security. Numbers are best suited for such operationalizations, which then pierce straight through to reality in the form of money. After we have committed ourselves above to a rejection of pessimism, contrary negative events such as higher unemployment and loss figures are fenced in as harmless or just “priced in” via the unclouded positive future outlook and thus present a further incentive to buy as “expected”. In crisis situations the national banks provide the necessary funds by purchasing of loss-making government and corporate bonds and by keeping the interest rates ultra-low. This newly created money fuels the buying frenzy in stock and real-estate markets.
The perpetual invocation of this fiction suggests that there must be an irrefutable law inherent in the system which underlies the practice of this ritualization and gives the cold shoulder to the evil reality of macro- and microeconomic decline. It is a suggestion, a creation of a space for hope and action in the face of a seemingly threatening and overwhelming predicament– quasi in an ignorance of the miserable present the anticipation of a better future.