Mainly, it lies there. a pile of asphalt showing its age. It runs from Broadway to South Street--a skinny little thing, hardly worth calling a thoroughfare. It has a church at one end, sort of--but it can't really claim it, the address is Broadway. It suffers the indignities of trash, dog poop, and other detritus, not to mention punctures by stiletto heels,

If it could think, it would probably be a pretty mournful set of thoughts, longing for the days when it marked the northern boundary of the city and could look at cows, rather than bulls or bears. But that's the point. Wall Street doesn't think. Wall Street doesn't react. Wall Street doesn't believe. Wall Street doesn't approve, or disapprove, and it doesn't panic. It just lies there, a skinny little ribbon of asphalt, and short, to boot.

Just look at it:

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I have to move on lest someone think a brain injury has made it impossible to understand metaphors. I use them myself, sparingly. My point is that every time the media speaks of Wall Street doing something, the act becomes depersonalized and the metaphor becomes ground cover for the living, breathing, women and men who actually do the things ascribed to Wall Street. Wall Street didn't invent bizarre financial instruments--some person did. Wall Street did not respond negatively to Obama's revisions of TARP...some people did, a quantifiable number, and not a huge number at that. The number of shares traded on any given day is huge, but quantifiable, the number of trades is smaller, but still rather large, I would gather. The number of significant trades--large bundles of shares, not a pocketful, must be smaller yet, and at the top of this pyramid, the number of managers making those trades and making those trades on their own authority must be smaller yet.

I don't know if it is possible to know who those wheeler-dealers are, I suspect not, except when they get indicted for something. I sometimes wish it was, and those calling for transparency in Government would call for equal transparency in finance. I'm not particularly interested in punishing them for dumb moves, except perhaps on my really cranky days. But I think the dumb move makers should be as visible to the public as the pro baseball player who strikes out in the bottom of the ninth, bases loaded, on a sucker pitch a sand lot tyro wouldn't have gone for in a million years.

I have to go, the Society for the Protection of Unjustly Maligned Asphalt meets in ten minutes.