, Columnist
When Cleverness Becomes Manipulation
Also Deutsche Bank's retreat and Goldman's lifestyle branding.
Manipulation, or not (1).
What is market manipulation? Well I certainly don’t know. From first principles, it seems like it would mean doing something to a market to make the price move, as opposed to just leaving the market alone to work itself out. But in practice, any time you interact with a market, you will do something to it: Any time you buy a thing, you will tend to push its price up; any time you sell it, you will tend to push the price down. Everyone who participates in a market necessarily manipulates it, in the minimal sense. There’s the famous definition given by a cotton trader, that manipulation means “any operation of the cotton market that does not suit the gentleman who is speaking at the moment.”