STOCK EXCHANGE AND AMERICAN BUSINESS 477
crowd” or “the West,” or some equally far-off and indefinite
set of men, had “decided to smash prices.” This suggestion of
a deep-laid plot by mysterious conspirators is as old as Hindoo
mythology, and rarely fails of popular appeal—witness the mo-
tion pictures! The editor’s position has been stated quite can-
didly by a well-known financial journalist?
It is always easier to say that the market is going down because
it is being raided by powerful and conscienceless bears than merely
to call attention to the undoubted fact that no one wants to buy stocks.
It not only sounds better, it reads and writes more easily. The writer
knows what he is talking about, for he had to fill a column in a New
York newspaper with stock market gossip every day for five or six
years.
The public must always personify what is going on. There is no
way of personifying the cold fact that people do not want to buy
stocks, and a financial editor cannot find new ways of stating this
naked, unadorned and comfortless truth every day in the year. But
once you introduce the bear, there is something the public imagina-
tion can fasten itself upon.
Effect on the Public Mind.—The effect of such pictur-
esque financial columns on the general public is only too evi-
dent. Amid the murky fog of vague and unfamiliar economic
and financial terms which he doesn’t understand, the average
citizen finds, in this human side of the story, something that he
can really comprehend. Prices went down and some myster-
ious person did it—that to him is the crux of the matter. Un-
less he makes so thorough and complete a study of the econ-
omics of the stock market that he can realize what absurd non-
sense this personifying of economic forces really leads to, the
more he investigates the mystery, the more strange and mys-
terious it all becomes. He never learns who the “Palm Beach
crowd” is, or exactly how even the Argus-eyed editor knows
that it is responsible for the decline. Neither is he ever told
who the real “insiders” in the market are. Many knowing nods,
wise looks, and vaguely cynical adages he may encounter, but
vo. See Albert W. Atwood, “Vanished Millions,” Saturday Evening Post, February
