Abstract

Finance

A glance at the U.S. stock market, either of last week or of the three or four preceding weeks, would give the impression that the financial community was paying no attention to the day's momentous occurrences in Eastern Europe. Russia is delivered into the enemy's hands by the treacherous usurpers of Petrograd. Her army disbands, leaving its munitions for the Germans. Her territory is carved up into four or more separate states, according to the whim of Berlin. Rumania surrenders. The German army overruns Russia and demands that Rumania give it free right of transit. Yet the Stock Exchange is unmoved. Not unnaturally, people are asking whether the stock market has lost its traditional power of reflecting and interpreting events. Wall Street answers the question in various ways. One explanation is that the stock market not only has reflected developments in Eastern Europe, but that it foreshadowed them, that the great decline in prices during November and December, when the political and moral collapse of Russia had already become unmistakable, expressed the financial community's expectation of precisely the series of events which followed.