Gillian Tett

But will you tell us what does that mean, first of all, and how does that come to life?

Well, using a word like that probably makes me sound like a sort of, you know, posh professor or something like that.

And I am actually also linked to Cambridge University.

So you actually are a posh professor.

I'm not a professor, but I run a college there called King's College.

And anthropomorphise basically means that you are treating the stock market

as if it wasn't just a bunch of numbers or an abstract thing out there, but as a living being that has feelings and moods and sentiments and thoughts of its own.

And there's a growing tendency to do that, to treat it as if it was a real-life thing or creature that, as we like to say, feels upset at latest data releases or it decides to test a new level in the stock market or something like that.

So that's really what's going on at the moment as people are increasingly look at the stock market, not just as a mirror to ourselves and a barometer about how we feel about the future, but also almost like a quasi God or sometimes demon that's keeping tabs on us all.

I think it's an absolutely brilliant question because the reality is that, to use another big word, there's been an enormous amount of financialisation in America.

And that means treating everything in life as if it was an asset which could be bought or sold and have a price put on it.

And the capital markets, the stock market and the bond market, have exploded in size.

not just relative to the past in America, but relative to other countries.

And the American stock market has gone up dramatically.

And as a result, when people talk about the global stock market, what they're increasingly talking about is the American stock market.

Absolutely.

And this really is a lot of both American triumphalism and tech triumphalism.

And that matters enormously right now when you look at the markets because although in some ways the Iran war is a made-in-America problem, just like the subprime mortgage crisis back in 2007 was a made-in-American problem,

The bitter, ghastly irony of what's going on is that just as America recovered from the subprime problems faster than other people, in this current case, America's probably better insulated against the economic fallout of the Iran war than most other countries.

A lot of it is down to the fact that it actually has enormous fossil fuel industry itself, unlike many other countries like Ireland, for example.