How Noise Matters to Finance

The stock market is the background of how we begin to deal with the complex imbrication of humans, machines, and noise

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As scores of crises over the past century have shown, the stock market is manipulable and manipulated. The market is composed of human-made machines, which are affected by a lack of predictability more fundamental than the human: the noise of the material world. N. Adriana Knouf draws on historical and contemporary documents to show how noise—sonic, informatic, or otherwise—affects the ways in which financial markets function. How Noise Matters to Finance draws on different forms of financial noise, paying attention to how materiality and the interference of humans and machines causes the meanings of noise to shift over space and time.

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