The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street

In this fascinating book, Justin Fox, the business and economics columnist for Time magazine, charts the rise and fall of the myth of the efficient market. This notion was mostly American in origin, so Fox tells its story in a few universities, including, crucially, Chicago. Fox shows how life has exploded the idea that the market can rationally process information and allocates resources efficiently to the optimal use.This is in part a history of those looking for a sure-fire way of making money from the stock market. They share the fantasy that they can know where share prices are going and the level of risk, and that they can produce a `scientific forecast of the market'. Of course, when markets crash, most investing `stars' crash too. If the market were efficient, surely speculators could never beat it?But the crash of capitalism has crashed its theories too. As Alan Greenspan admitted, "the whole intellectual edifice collapsed." Adair Turner, chairman of the Financial Services Authority, said that we had experienced `a fairly complete train wreck of a predominant theory of economics and finance'.Clive Granger and Oskar Morgenstern's 1970 book, Predictability of stock market prices, said, "It is ... a subterfuge going back at least to Adam Smith and David Ricardo to say that market price will always oscillate around the true (equilibrium) price. But since no methods are developed how to separate the oscillations from the basis, this is not an empirically testable assertion and it can be disregarded."Eugene Fama, who had in the 1960s formulated the efficient market hypothesis, admitted in 1991, "Irrational bubbles in stock prices are indistinguishable from rational time-varying expected returns." There was no way to know if the market was irrationally volatile or not. He now believed that prices could go wrong and stay wrong: he no longer believed that prices were right.Markets' behaviour determines the economic reality that market prices are supposed to reflect. The market is created subjectively; it does not reflect the real world. The market is actually not about efficiently allocating capital but about giving speculative parasites chances to make vast profits with our money. As Larry Summers, Clinton's Treasury Secretary, concluded, "We might all be better off without a stock market."