Financial History Issue 125 (Spring 2018) | Page 42
BOOK REVIEW BY JAMES P. PROUT
Reading the Market:
Genres of Financial Capitalism
in Gilded Age America
By Peter Knight
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017
336 pp. with notes and index
$24.95
Paperback
It is not unusual today to have finance
or banking as the centerpiece of a popular
television series, movie, play or novel. The
Big Short had Margot Robbie in a bathtub
trying to explain mortgage securitization.
Billions is in its third year, and by mixing
bonds with bondage, it looks to be good
for another couple of seasons. Financial
markets are just too rich a source of char-
acters and plot lines to be far from drama
or comedy.
There are many who may think that
the depiction of financial markets is a
pretty straightforward proposition. Finan-
cial markets gather capital and distribute
it. Individuals and institutions — some
malevolent, some not — invest and specu-
late on the value of financial assets at
a given moment. Money is made and
money is lost. Like any other human
endeavor, some parts of this process are
easier to understand than others.
For others, depictions of financial mar-
kets express themes that are anything but
straightforward or simple. Good versus
evil, success versus failure, beauty versus
baseness; these just scratch the service.
Finance-themed cartoons, organizational
charts, gossip columns and travel literature
carry with them deep seeded psychologi-
cal and societal messages that transcend
easy characterization. That is the basic
premise of Professor Peter Knight’s book,
Reading the Market: Genres of Financial
Capitalism in Gilded Age America.
Knight starts his analysis by looking at
the humble daily stock market reports that
began to occupy a more prominent place
in periodicals at the turn of the century.
Citing issues of the New York Herald and
Harper’s magazine and other publications,
he notes they adopted a style of market
reporting that sought to alter the public’s
perception of the markets and “transform
ordinary Americans into vicarious specta-
tors of finance.”
As “the market” became more broadly
followed, Knight asserts, the ticker tape
machine became more than a collection
of gears and spools. Instead, the clack-
ing beneath the glass dome personified
both the immediacy and abstraction of
trading floor activity. “Far from being a
mere unfeeling machine, however,” he
writes, “it is presented in the rhetoric of
technologically infused spiritualism as a
40 FINANCIAL HISTORY | Spring 2018 | www.MoAF.org
sensitive medium, picking up, in advance,
the movements of human history that
elude conscious apprehension.” Whew,
that’s a lot from a paper tape.
Using the same approach, the book
turns next to other popular pictures of
the market at the time. These include car-
toons, travel books and Babson’s charts
of the ups and downs of business activ-
ity. These, according to the professor,
“worked not through the genre of realism,
but instead were, in an important sense,
self-referential artifacts, akin to forms
of modernist art that were beginning to
emerge at the same time.”
The book moves to its ending with a dis-
cussion of how confidence games and con-
spiracy theories of the era were portrayed.
Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man
is discussed, as are the works of William
Dean Howells, Edith Wharton, Walter
Lippmann and the Pujo Commission. No
study of this sort would be complete with-
out J.P. Morgan, who makes an obliga-
tory appearance. Knight extracts messages
from each, including the industrialization
of fraud, the disruption of localized trust
and “the actual mutual back-scratching of
a clubbable coterie.”
Professor Knight has highlighted some
interesting connections between popu-
lar depictions of financial markets in the
Gilded Age. He certainly sees unifying
themes among them, however unconnected
and random his selections may be.
James P. Prout is a lawyer with 30+ years
of capital market experience. He now is
a consultant to some of the world’s big-
gest corporations. He can be reached at
jpprout@gmail.com.