“The Velocity of Money” – Stephen Rhodes

They smoked in silence for a few moments.

“This business.” McGeary expelled a mushroom cloud of blue smoke, then continued. “This business we’re in can be all- consuming, you know? You liquidate your youth in the pursuit of legal tender. And of course it’s worth it, I wouldn’t have traded a moment of it to be anyplace else. But it’s all-consuming, you really do lose perspective on what’s important. It’s not this.

On the corner of Church Street, he noticed the light was on in the window of a modest shoe repair shop. He was drawn to it. …His nimble fingers worked confidently at the task at hand, as he plied a humble trade that had been insulated from the technological boon that had revolutionised so many other businesses.

The shoemaker was hunched over his workbench, working through the night to repair the wing-tip shoes of Wall Street executives. Watching the shoemaker risking with sharp implements in dim lights to put food on the table for his family gave Rick a sting of guilt. Rick half this man’s age and he was using his graduate-fortified brain to participate in the massive wealth transfers that the financial community did so well. The shoemaker and the securities lawyer-they were at opposite ends of a spectrum. As the man worked in the dim light, he seemed blissfully uninformed about the magnitude of the afternoon’s free fall in the stock market. But even if the shoemaker didn’t realise it, his life would be affected by the shock waves. If the markets continued to drop indefinitely, Wall Streeters would be terminated by the thousands. The shoemaker’s client base would shrink commensurately. Indeed, if the value of stocks continued to plunge, the confidence in the economy could quickly evaporate. A ripple effect might plunge the country into a recession. Then the shoemaker and his family would truly feel the effects of the market break. What happened to Wall Street affected what happened of Main Street. There was no denying that.

… It was the national obsession. Everybody was talking about it, everybody. It had become the thing of the moment, like gourmet coffee bars, or Rollerblading or the Internet. It was featured in sitcom plots, the dust jackets of bestsellers, mainstream magazines. The media was happily complicit in fuelling the obsession, creating new cable channels devoted entirely to the subject.

All across the country, it was the hot topic at church socials, the PTA meetings and pickup bars. They talked about it in the beauty parlour, baby showers, cocktail parties and bridge games at retirement communities. It has become the common denominator linking the cabdriver with the bank president, the wheat farmer with the architect, the housewife with the computer engineer. Your mother didn’t want to discuss her health, no, she wanted to talk about it.

The stock market: everybody wanted a piece of the action.