It’s been 96 years since the Stock Market Crash of 1929, and one has to wonder: have we learned anything, or just gotten better at hiding the chaos?
The frenzied trading floors of the past, filled with shouting brokers, have been replaced by silent, sterile server farms. The new market makers? High-frequency trading algorithms that execute trades in microseconds.
Consider this:
- The entire planet's annual silver production is now traded on paper nearly every single week. A physical impossibility that speaks volumes about market abstraction.
- The human element of 'market sentiment' is increasingly supplanted by AI-driven decisions based on complex, often opaque, models.
We've swapped ticker tape for terabytes, but is the underlying system any more stable? Instead of panicked traders, we now have the potential for flash crashes sparked by dueling algorithms.
So, 96 years on, are we just building a more sophisticated house of cards? Is it time to question the very architecture of our financial world, starting with central banking?
