On a recent episode of Marketplace, after another
day of "volatility" in the stock market, host Kai Ryssdal asked New York bureau
chief Heidi Moore about that particular day's anxiety, apparently caused by
untrue rumors about a French bank. Moore pointed out that "all you really need
to destroy even the strongest bank is a rumor." In the same interview, Ryssdal
asked what might take us back to the panic of 2008. Moore's answer was
essentially the same: rumors and innuendo. We are vulnerable to the realities
produced by our own anxieties.

While this seems to me a rather facile economic analysis, it
highlights the odd reality that the markets are as much a psychological
phenomenon as a tangible one--and that the current state of their being is
anxious.

In an essay in The
American Scholar,
poet Christian Wiman addresses this "hive of nerves." We
frequently discuss and devote many hours of our day to the anxiety of daily
existence, he writes. This anxiety pervades nearly every aspect of our lives
and seems, collectively and individually, to be on the rise.