The despair of a downward graph

"The business of America is business", said Calvin Coolidge, but try telling that to this beleaguered stock exchange trader as all the graphs on his screens plunge downward. This is the image of a week in which markets realised that American politics may be ready to send the American economy to hell. It became clear that arguments in Washington were so severe and extreme they might actually lead to the inconceivable drama of the world's most powerful nation defaulting on its public debt, with potentially cataclysmic consequences. No one believed that was really going to happen, until the markets took fright this week. In this man's exhaustion and anxiety you can see the confusion over how such unreality has become real.

The picture captures a strange and eerie moment, as recovery from the crash of 2008 falters everywhere. Graphs like the ones that glow with fatal information in this photograph were giving bad news across the western hemisphere. In Britain, a graph published by the Office for National Statistics this week revealed just 0.2% growth in the national economy this spring. On it you can see clearly how British gross domestic product crashed in 2008, then follow the line upward in a steep climb of recovery, and then, since 2010, see it fall.

Meanwhile, the economist Paul Krugman drew attention, in his New York Times blog, to a graph that shows German interest rates sharply declining. According to Krugman this shows that "European recovery is sputtering out".

Well, it might say that to a Nobel prize-winning Keynesian economist, but a German interest rate graph says comparatively little, and that of debatable meaning, to lay people. Graphs, it seems, are the only mathematical tool that can provide a picture, a legible image, of the day-to-day and year-to-year movements of modern economies, which are so abstract. The man in this picture, sitting by his screens with his little American flag, spends all day moving vast sums of money that only exist as numbers, ideas, credit. The financial sector deals in notional money and speculates these notional sums against national economies, as rating agencies denounce or threaten one national economy after another. What does it all mean, this floating world of imaginary wealth and imaginary poverty?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jul/29/graph-american-trader-photo