CHAPTER XVII 
THE STOCK EXCHANGE AND AMERICAN 
BUSINESS 
Sensitiveness of Security and Money Markets.—Prac- 
tically every significant economic force in America, and the 
principal economic factors in the life of foreign nations as well, 
make their influence felt instantly and often in advance, upon 
the course of the security prices established on the floor of the 
New York Stock Exchange. 
The newcomer in Wall Street is always astonished at this 
tremendous sensitiveness of the money and securities markets 
to domestic and foreign happenings, present and future. Stock 
Exchange prices fluctuate as constantly and as unexpectedly as 
life itself, and possess some of the inevitable rhythm of prog- 
ress. Not only crop reports and crop prospects, banking and 
money conditions, steel production, commodity prices, and the 
lurking possibilities of war, but also labor conditions, unem- 
ployment, strikes present or prospective, idle freight cars, busi- 
ness failures, interest rates, building reports, retail sales, the 
legislative enactments and judicial decisions of Washington, 
and a thousand other events—all directly and profoundly affect 
the course of security prices on the Exchange. In addition, the 
stock market must reckon with all manuer of cabled foreign 
news, the British bank statement, changes in French taxation, 
the production of gold in the Rand, of copper in Spain, of tin 
and rubber in the Straits, the foreign exchange rates, the 
foreign exports and imports of this and other leading nations, 
and the decisions and strategy of the chancellories of Europe. 
A well-known banker was once found pacing up and down 
his Wall Street office in evident anxiety. When asked what 
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