So the US has the world’s biggest, deepest capital market. It just happens to be run from the world’s biggest insane asylum. It all looks so orderly from the outside. The skyline seen from the New Jersey approaches. Or Big Board trading lined up in neat rows of charts and numbers in the paper. Yet beneath it all is a roiling mass of humanity and machinery.
Anyone who has been stuck under the East River in a moldering subway car waiting for a ‘track fire’ ahead to be extinguished is familiar with that uniquely New York feeling: too many people in too small a space with absolutely no control over their situation. The feeling on the NYSE trading floor, waiting for the opening bell the morning after Asian market antics, must be much the same.
Some believe New York is due for a major quake. In 1885 it had a magnitude five quake, and a force four tremor hit Westchester in 1984. But the big one is yet to come. Kind of scary. Then again, I live in a Brooklyn neighborhood reputedly floating on top of a sea of spilled oil. Summer barbecues and fireworks hold a special thrill.
Every day millions of New Yorkers jounce to work over the world’s worst potholes, past pipes venting torrents of steam. Am I the only one who wonders what’s down there? Not so long ago a 92-foot ship was found under Front Street – 17th century developers sank old boats and covered them with earth to expand the land in lower Manhattan. Another time tunneling ‘sandhogs’ found a 10,000 year-old forest 200 feet beneath the upper west side. Or an entire ‘lost’ subway system from 1870.
Myths aside, New York’s only alligator was a 125 lb specimen pulled from the sewer by four boys in 1935. It was not albino, giant or blind. But there may indeed be a race of troglodytes living in vast subterranean caverns. Or at least a criminal genius à la Lex Luthor.
Last month, Niri-New York held an evening meeting on the NYSE floor – a floor meticulously swept of the usual ankle-high litter of orders. After some polite chit-chat over canapes, glasses of wine in hand, the IROs took part in mock-trading with real NYSE specialists. Perhaps this is what stock trading would be like if the Big Board were in Paris or London instead of New York. Or Silicon Valley, but with Evian instead of wine.
But the NYSE is not in California. Real trading is not sunny and mellow; it’s a roisterous cacophony of shouting and flying paper. It’s humanity and machinery entwined in a rancorous embrace. It’s Hieronymous Bosch with money lust. And, somehow, like the crazy city itself, it seems to work.
