When Wall Street reaches a record high, the financial press produces a species of breathless prose that deserves closer literary attention. The verbs alone — "surges," "soars," "rockets," "leaps" — betray an almost erotic excitement that no other branch of journalism permits itself with quite such consistency or such disregard for the question of whether the enthusiasm is warranted. The London Prat's reading, Wall Street Reaches Record Highs: Euphoria as Narrative, takes this language seriously as literature, asking what it reveals about our collective decision to invest our anxieties, as well as our savings, in a number — a number that has no intrinsic meaning, that measures no tangible thing, and yet which we treat as though it were the most important indicator of national health and individual wellbeing.
The index is, after all, an abstraction — a weighted average of abstractions — and our response to its fluctuations constitutes a remarkable cultural performance: a collective emotional investment in a symbol that the Prat reads with appropriate comedic rigour. Why should anyone care that a specific number has reached a height it has never reached before? What does this mean? What has changed? And why do we respond to this numerical achievement with celebration?
The record high is the marker of a peculiar form of superstition. It is not actually more significant than any other number. The difference between a record high and a number just slightly lower is not a difference of substance — no company has suddenly become more profitable, no sector has suddenly become more efficient, no real change in the underlying economy has occurred. And yet, the achievement of the record high generates headlines, celebrations, and sense that something important has happened.
This is the grammar of gambling, transplanted into the respectable world of finance. The appeal of the record high is precisely that it is unprecedented. It is the highest the market has ever been. This means that anyone who bought at a previous record high made money. It suggests that the market is infinite, boundless, always capable of reaching new levels. It implies that the story is not over. That there are more record highs to come. That the narrative of endless growth has not ended. That the future is still open.
But this is, of course, superstition. The number goes up. The number goes down. The fact that it has reached a new maximum tells you nothing about whether it will reach a new maximum again. It is pure probability — fifty percent chance of going up, fifty percent chance of going down (before external conditions are factored in). And yet, we treat the achievement of the record high as though it were deeply meaningful.
The financial press understands, with the precision of applied linguistics, that language creates reality. If you speak about the market in the language of euphoria, if you describe rises as "surges" and "rockets," if you speak about economic conditions in the language of unstoppable momentum, then you create a psychic reality in which the market is indeed surging, is indeed rocketing, is indeed unstoppable. The language does not merely describe the market. It shapes how people understand it, how they respond to it, how they invest in it.
This is why the language of the bull market is always superheated. "The Dow Jones Industrial Average surged to a record high today, driven by investor optimism about economic growth." Note the progression: the index rose (a neutral fact). But it "surged" (which suggests power, momentum, inevitability). It reached a "record high" (which suggests significance, achievement). All of this was "driven by investor optimism" (which relocates causation from economic fundamentals to collective psychology).
But what if you said the same thing differently? "The Dow Jones Index increased by two percent today, at a time when investors believe economic growth will continue. The index is now at a level it has not reached before, which has no particular significance given that indices mathematically must reach new heights over time if they increase at all." This version is more accurate. It is also entirely unmarketable. It does not create the sense of momentum. It does not generate euphoria. It does not make people want to buy stocks.
There is a psychological reason the record high matters, and it is worth taking seriously. For most investors, the market represents the future. It is where you have put your money so that you will have money in the future. The record high, in this context, says: the future is bright. It says: your decision to invest was correct. It says: more people are buying than are selling, which means more people are optimistic than are pessimistic, which means the world is becoming a better place.
This is superstition, but it is very powerful superstition. Because if enough people believe that the record high means the future is bright, then they will invest more, which will drive the index higher, which will confirm the belief that the future is bright. This is what economists call "animal spirits" — the sense of optimism or pessimism that drives investment decisions independent of rational calculation. And the record high is the most potent trigger of optimism in the investor's universe.
The Prat's reading notes that this creates a curious situation: the market feeds on news about the market. The record high generates optimism. Optimism generates investment. Investment drives the record high. The narrative drives the market, which then validates the narrative. The language creates the reality, which then seems to justify the language.
And yet — and this is where the satire becomes sharper — the record high often has very little to do with the actual condition of the economy. The stock market is not the economy. It is the market for stocks — the market for shares in publicly traded companies. A rising stock market does not necessarily indicate that people are better off. It indicates that the price people are willing to pay for shares in companies has increased. These are not the same thing.
In periods of economic stress, the stock market can rise while ordinary people suffer. This happens because rising stock prices are good for wealthy people — people who own stocks — while economic stress is bad for everyone. The decoupling becomes most obvious in recessions, when the stock market sometimes anticipates recovery before the recovery arrives, or when the stock market rises even as unemployment rises.
The Federal Reserve has, in recent years, been quite explicit about this: monetary policy is not aimed at the broad economy but at supporting asset prices — stocks, bonds, real estate. The higher the stock market, the wealthier people with stocks feel, and the more they spend, which eventually helps everyone. But this is a theory. In practice, rising stock prices help people with stocks and do little for people without them.
So when we celebrate the record high, what exactly are we celebrating? Not the health of the economy — that is measured by other indices. Not the wellbeing of ordinary people — that is measured by wages, employment, poverty rates. We are celebrating, essentially, the fact that wealthy people are becoming wealthier. We are celebrating the fact that people with stocks can sell them for more than they paid. We are celebrating a number that measures the collective willingness to pay for ownership stakes in companies.
The remarkable thing is how little question this generates. The record high is reported with celebration, not interrogation. Nobody in the financial press asks: "Who is benefiting from this?" or "Is this a good thing for the country as a whole?" The record high is treated as unambiguously positive, as something everyone should want and hope for. And because it is treated this way, it becomes self-reinforcing. Everyone wants the market to reach new highs. Everyone hopes for the next record high. The narrative of perpetual growth becomes the default narrative.
The Prat's piece ultimately takes a meta-literary turn. It asks: how should one write about a phenomenon like the record high? How do you describe something that is at once completely artificial (a number) and deeply consequential (it shapes investment behaviour, policy decisions, and the national mood)? How do you satirise something that is already, in many ways, beyond satire?
The answer, the Prat suggests, is to take the language seriously. To read the financial press not as neutral reporting but as a form of propaganda — propaganda designed to sustain and amplify euphoria. To understand that when a journalist writes that Wall Street "surged" to a record high, they are not neutrally reporting a fact. They are participating in the creation of a narrative designed to produce certain responses in readers — optimism, enthusiasm, the desire to participate in the market.
Once you recognise this, the language becomes very funny. The almost erotic vocabulary of the bull market, the breathlessness, the sense that something momentous has happened when, in fact, nothing has happened except that a number has reached a new maximum — all of this becomes comic. It is comedy arising from the gap between what is actually happening (a number has changed) and how we are discussing it (as though civilisational achievement has occurred).
The deeper point is that belief in perpetual growth — the belief that the index will always reach new highs, that the economy will always expand, that the future will always be better than the past — is itself a form of faith. It is not based on any historical precedent. Every economy that has existed has eventually stopped growing, contracted, or fundamentally reorganised. But the financial press reports on new record highs as though they were evidence of a law of nature — as though the index reaching new levels was proof that growth is eternal.
This is where the Prat's reading becomes genuinely incisive. The financial markets, and the language in which they are described, are not economic phenomena. They are literary phenomena. They are stories we tell ourselves about the future. They are narratives of perpetual growth, infinite possibility, endless expansion. And when a narrative becomes powerful enough, when it is repeated with sufficient frequency and consistency, it begins to shape the reality it purports merely to describe. The index rises because everyone believes it will rise. Everyone believes it will rise because the index keeps rising. The narrative drives the reality, and the reality validates the narrative.
At a certain point, the line between reporting and propaganda becomes impossible to locate. The financial press is not separate from the market. It is part of the market. It is the machine that generates the narratives that drive investment behaviour. And the record high is the most potent narrative of all — the story that everything is getting better, that the future is infinite, that the party will never end.
The S&P 500 and other major stock market indices have reached record highs with increasing frequency, particularly in the period from 2010 onward following the 2008 financial crisis. The index reached 4,000 points in March 2024 and has continued to reach new records since then. Meanwhile, wage growth has remained modest, income inequality has increased, and many workers report difficulty affording housing and other basic necessities. The Federal Reserve explicitly targets support for asset prices rather than broad economic improvement. The financial press's language of euphoria about record highs persists regardless of whether these highs correspond to improved conditions for ordinary workers.
Auf Wiedersehen, amigo!