The scene was stupendous. Beyond doubt this was the home of the moneychangers.
We looked down into a room at least a thousand feet on each side, perhaps a hundred fifty feet from floor to ceiling. In the middle of everything was the great masculine shaft of the central financial computer: a glossy column twenty yards in diameter, rising from the floor and disappearing through the ceiling. Every brokerage house in the world had its direct input to that machine. Within its polished depths existed who knew how many clicking and chattering relays, how many memory cores of fantastic smallness, how many phone links, how many data tanks? With one swift bolt of a laser cannon it would be possible to sever the communications network that held together the financial structure of civilization. I looked warily at Vornan-19, wondering what deviltry he had in mind. But he seemed calm, aloof, only faintly interested in the floor of the Exchange.
About the central rod of the computer shaft were situated smaller cagelike structures, some thirty or forty of them, each with its cluster of excited, gesticulating brokers. The open space between these booths was littered with papers. Messenger boys scurried frantically about, kicking the discarded papers into clouds. Overhead, draped from one wall to the other, ran the gigantic yellow ribbon of the stock ticker, reeling off in magnified form the information that the main computer was transmitting everywhere. It seemed odd to me that a computerized stock exchange would have all this bustle and clutter on its floor, and that there would be so much paper lying about, as though the year were 1949 instead of 1999. But I did not take into account the force of tradition among these brokers. Men of money are conservative, not necessarily in ideology but certainly in habit. They want everything to remain as it has always been.
Half a dozen Stock Exchange executives came out to greet us — crisp, gray-haired men, attired in neat old-fashioned business suits. They were unfathomably rich, I suppose; and why, given such riches, they chose to spend the days of their lives in this building I could not and cannot understand. But they were friendly. I suspect they would give the same warm, open-handed greeting to a touring delegation from the socialist countries that have not yet adopted modified capitalism — say, a pack of touring zealots from Mongolia. They thrust themselves upon us, and they seemed almost as delighted to have a gaggle of touring professors on their balcony as they did to have a man claiming to come from the far future.
The President of the Stock Exchange, Samuel Norton, made us a brief, courtly speech. He was a tall, well-groomed man of middle years, easy of manner, obviously quite pleased with his place in the universe. He told us of the history of his organization, gave us some weighty statistics, boasted a bit about the current Stock Exchange headquarters, which had been built in the 1980’s, and closed by saying, “Our guide will now show you the workings of our operations in detail. When she’s finished, I’ll be happy to answer any general questions you may have — particularly those concerning the underlying philosophy of our system, which I know must be of great interest to you.
The guide was an attractive girl in her twenties with short, shiny red hair and a gray uniform artfully designed to mask her feminine characteristics. She beckoned us forward to the edge of the balcony and said, “Below us you see the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange. At the present time, four thousand one hundred twenty-five common and preferred stocks are traded on the Exchange. Dealings in bonds are handled elsewhere. In the center of the floor you see the shaft of our main computer. It extends thirteen stories into the basement and rises eight stories above us. Of the hundred floors in this building, fifty-one are used wholly or in part for the operations of this computer, including the levels for programming, decoding, maintenance, and record storage. Every transaction that takes place on the floor of the Exchange or on any of the subsidiary exchanges in other cities and countries is noted with the speed of light within this computer. At present there are eleven main subsidiary exchanges: San Francisco, Chicago, London. Zurich, Milan, Moscow, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Rio de Janeiro, Addis Ababa, and — ah — Sydney. Since these span all time zones, it is possible to carry out securities transactions twenty-four hours a day. The New York Exchange, however, is open only from ten in the morning to half past three, the traditional hours, and all ‘off-the-floor’ transactions are recorded and analyzed for the pre-opening session the following morning. Our daily volume on the main trading floor is about three hundred fifty million shares, and roughly twice that many shares are traded each day on the subsidiary exchanges. Only a generation ago such figures would have been regarded as fantastic.
“Now, how does a securities transaction take place?
“Let us say that you, Mr. Vornan, wish to purchase one hundred shares of XYZ Space Transit Corporation. You have seen in yesterday’s tapes that the market price is currently about forty dollars a share, so you know that you must invest approximately four thousand dollars. Your first step is to contact your broker, which of course can be done by a touch of your finger to your telephone. You place your order with him, and he immediately relays it to the trading floor. The particular data bank in which XYZ Space Transit transactions are recorded takes his call and notes your order. The computer conducts an auction, just as has been done in listed securities on the Exchange since 1792. The offers to sell XYZ Space Transit are matched against the offers to buy. At the speed of light it is determined that one hundred shares are available for sale at forty, and that a buyer exists. The transaction is closed and your broker notifies you. A small commission is his only charge to you; in addition there is a small fee for the computer services of the Exchange. A portion of this goes to the retirement fund of the so-called specialists who formerly handled the matching of buy and sell orders on the trading floor.
“Since everything is handled by computer, you may wonder what is taking place elsewhere on the trading floor. What you see represents a delightful Stock Exchange tradition: although not strictly necessary any longer, we maintain a staff of brokers who buy and sell securities for their own accounts, exactly as in the old days. They are following the precomputer process. Let me trace the course of a single transaction for you…”
In clean, precise tones she showed us what all the mad scurrying on the floor was about. I was startled to realize that it was done purely as a charade; the transactions were unreal and at the end of each day all accounts were canceled. The computer actually handled everything. The noise, the discarded papers, the intricate gesticulations — these were reconstructions of the archaic past, performed by men whose lives had lost their purpose. It was fascinating and depressing: a ritual of money, a running-down of the capitalistic clock. Old brokers who would not retire took part in this daily amusement, I gathered, while alongside them the monstrous shaft of the computer, which had unmanned them a decade previously, gleamed as the erect symbol of their impotence.
Our guide droned on and on, telling us of the stock ticker and the Dow-Jones averages, deciphering the cryptic symbols that drifted dreamily by on the screen, talking of bulls and bears, of short sellers, of margin requirements, of many another strange and wonderful thing. As the climax of her act she switched on a computer output and allowed us to have a squint at the boiling madhouse within the master brain, where transactions took place at improbable speeds and billions of dollars changed hands within moments.