The sky above Wall Street is of an unreal blue, clear, as if washed by a rain that never fell. On the asphalt, reflections of skyscrapers stretch like greedy fingers. Above, on the screens, red and green numbers pulse with the hypnotic rhythm of an ancient rite. A new rite. Gold: $4,441. Silver: $70. S&P 500: in perpetual ecstasy. The charts resemble the north face of the Eiger, an oblique and relentless line defying gravity, logic, history. A mass is being celebrated, and the host is the record. The blood, the liquidity. The faithful gaze at the luminous altars of their screens and see salvation, or perhaps just the glow of a sunset they mistake for dawn. It is a moment of estranged peace, of suspicious harmony. Like the silence before a thunderclap everyone feels coming, but no one dares mention. We walk on thin glass, and below, in the depths, shadows of data stir, of whispers, of a truth too inconvenient to name.
The air tastes metallic with euphoria. Analysts speak of "momentum," of "the resilience of the American economy," of a "miraculous soft landing." The headlines of the financial press are hymns to the power of the market. And yet, in this cathedral of money, someone has forgotten to check the foundations. Or perhaps they checked them, saw the cracks, and decided to patch them with the wallpaper of press releases. A narrative of strength is being built on a terrain of statistical sand. The numbers, those tutelary deities of the modern economic religion, have ceased to speak. They sing. A seductive and dangerous melody.
The Art of Subtraction: How an Index Dies and a Myth is Born
To understand today's vertigo, one must bend over an administrative gesture. One of those that go unnoticed, buried in a Bureau of Labor Statistics release. It is here that prose becomes technical, but it is a technique that hides the metaphysics of power. Take the Producer Price Index, the PPI. A thermometer of inflation from the factory, the port, the mine. In January, the calculation method was changed. A "rebaselining." An innocuous word hiding a world. It is like changing the units of measurement on a scale while weighing gold. The old weights, those that showed stubborn inflation, were replaced. The new, more "modern," more "refined" method produces a more docile number. Inflation was not defeated; it was redesigned.
"Statistics is the first of the inexact sciences," wrote an old reporter, and today that inexactness has the color of ideology. It is not about error. It is about choice. Choosing which items to include in a basket, which weights to assign, how to treat seasonal products or dying technologies, is an act of extraordinary narrative power. The clay of economic reality is molded until it takes the desired shape. The shape of "normality." The shape that allows a Fed governor to speak of "convincing progress" while the average American pays double for milk compared to three years ago.
But the game does not end here. It is a palimpsest of omissions.
- The cost of energy, when it falls, is emphasized. When it rises, it is absorbed into broader categories, dampened.
- Mortgages, in the CPI inflation calculation, are replaced by a theoretical "owner's equivalent rent," a ghost of rent that moves with the slowness of a glacier, while real houses are out of reach.
- The quality of goods: a more expensive computer becomes "better," so the price per unit of performance is stable. An accounting magic trick. The result is a "core" inflation, domesticated, presented as the only truthful one. The one that burns the wallet, that of daily experiences, is relegated to anecdote, to emotional complaint. A dangerous dichotomy is thus created: the economy of data and the economy of life. The first soars. The second struggles. And the market celebrates the first, because it is the only one shown to it.
The Dance of Specters: Shutdown and the Credit of Faith
Against the backdrop of this fragile numerical architecture, another specter stirs: the specter of the shutdown. The federal administration that every few months threatens to close its doors, to suspend the release of those very data that have become the only gospel. It is a choreography of the absurd. The market, which feeds on information with the voracity of a teenager, is forced to contemplate silence. And what happens when the prophets fall silent?
What happens is that faith supersedes fact. In the absence of data—official, manipulated as they may be—the market navigates by sight, guided by the oracular statements of officials, by "sentiment indicators," by the vibrations of the financial ether. It is the realm of pure narrative. And the year-end narrative must be positive. It must. Bonuses, commissions, the constant flow of capital into passive funds depend on this fairy tale. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy based on an open secret: everyone knows the numbers are sick, but everyone agrees to dance as if they were healthy, because the music cannot stop. The shutdown is not a threat to transparency; it is its logical conclusion. Because if data are already a simulacrum, their absence is merely the truth taken to its extreme consequences.
In this theater, gold shines with a particular light. Its leap to unimagined levels is not just a bet against inflation. It is a bet against paper. Against the entire system. It is the gesture of those who, no longer able to believe the words printed on a Fed release, grasp the only thing that has spoken the same language for five thousand years: a yellow, dense, inert metal. Silver, the populist brother, follows with fury. It's not rational, economists say. Perhaps not. It is instinctive. It is the call of an ancestral memory that recognizes debt when it sees it, even dressed as a stock market record. It is the search for a peace that is not the hypnotic calm of the screen, but the solid, heavy peace of what cannot be hacked.
And the stock markets? They fly on this combination of eloquent silences and deafening noises. They fly because the liquidity injected in past decades must find a home somewhere. They fly because the alternative—facing the contradiction between financial asset prices and the health of the real economy—is too painful. It is a flight forward. A race to the edge of the chart, beyond which there is only the white of the switched-off screen, or the red of the crash.
The rhythm of the prose, perhaps too frantic until now, must slow down. Let's watch a leaf falling from a tree on a Brooklyn boulevard. It turns slowly, catching a ray of this unreal December sun. The economy is this. It is the leaf. The data are the wind we believe we measure. But perhaps we have forgotten the tree, its sick roots, the impoverished soil. The record bubble is not a financial phenomenon. It is a psychological, cultural phenomenon. It is the collective ability to suspend disbelief, to accept fiction as legal tender, because the alternative—the dismantling of the fiction—would entail immediate, intolerable pain.
So, what remains? The feeling of a tragic beauty remains. Like watching a huge sailing ship, all sails set, advancing majestically toward the horizon. We admire it, praise its lines, its power. Only later, with a shiver that is not cold but profound, do we realize there is no wind. The water is flat, still. And yet the ship advances. By what force? By what miracle? And for how much longer can it do so, before the law of gravity, the real one, not the suspended one of the markets, reasserts its dominion?
The question is not if. The question is when the narrative will collide with necessity. And in that moment, the artificial harmony will shatter. The peace of inflated portfolios will reveal itself for what it always was: a truce. Perhaps, in that moment, we will understand that true wealth was never in the numbers on the screen, but in something harder to measure, and impossible to fake. Something that resembles real trust, community, concrete work that produces concrete things. Until then, we dance on the transparent slab, admiring the void beneath our feet, and calling it sky.
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