Voodoo economics

Financial monitoring has borrowed a few ideas from science, but they may be the wrong ones, argues Philip Ball.

Philip Ball

The past few weeks have been a time of turmoil for economic markets. They have been lurching and plunging all over the place, prompting a rash of 'explanations' from market analysts.

"The noise in the markets is the sound of everyone and his dog coming up with post-facto justifications for the apparently random movements in assets from gold to equities, copper and the dollar," says Tom Stevenson in his 23 May investment column in the Daily Telegraph. But "what drives financial markets is not the ebb and flow of investment ratios and economic statistics but the fickle and often lemming-like workings of investors' minds," he adds.