Language Log

The wisdom of puns

August 6, 2024 @ 8:34 am · Filed by Mark Liberman under Linguistics in the comics

Recent stock-market volatility reminds us of this KAL cartoon:

August 6, 2024 @ 8:34 am · Filed by Mark Liberman under Linguistics in the comics

Cervantes said,

August 6, 2024 @ 12:58 pm

This from Krugman's newsletter today:

On Oct. 19, 1987, Black Monday, stock prices plunged, with the Dow Jones industrial average falling 22.6 percent in a day. Many commentators rushed to explain what triggered the crash — a response to some political event, some piece of economic data or whatever.

But the economist Robert J. Shiller managed to get a questionnaire out to many market participants as the crash was in progress and found that essentially nobody selling stocks explained their actions as a response to news. Instead, more or less the only important reason given for selling stocks was that … their prices were falling. In other words, the stock plunge looked like a panic that fed on itself.
Michael Vnuk said,

August 6, 2024 @ 10:29 pm

I was studying a financial management subject as part of a business administration qualification in 1987 when stocks crashed. The lecturer had already introduced us to how prices can be accurately determined using mathematics, the importance of open information, how scientific it all was, and so on. At the first lecture after the crash, I asked at the beginning of the class what information had changed that caused the crash and how did the theories explain it (or something like that), but he said that it was a topic that could be discussed in a tutorial and he went straight on with the lecture. I never got a satisfactory answer.