Funny thing about the stock market, it lives on gossip as it always has.
That was all very well in the days before any gossip who utters real information is guilty of the dread offence of "market abuse" and will be hung up by the ears by the Financial Services Authority.
Take that literally and all the gossip you hear must be ill-informed. And, whether it is right or wrong if it shifts the market in a way that suits the gossiper, he is meant to be in trouble regardless.
Insider trading has been a criminal offence for years - still is, come to that - but nobody was ever caught. The burden of proof was too demanding, so somebody dreamed up this novel regulatory offence - and still hardly anyone gets caught.
Yet rumours still drive the market. Yesterday it was bids looming for Barclays (again) and AstraZeneca.
Not long ago Hershey was supposed to be stalking Cadbury Schweppes - nobody explained how Hershey's people, who have barely ventured outside the States, would ginger things up running Cadbury, a complex multi-national. No matter, it gave the shares a boost.
It happens because the world is awash with cheap cash funding the stream of real bids that is driving the present worldwide bull market. You can find money for just about anything nowadays (unless, perhaps, you are Nanjing Automobile). Bidders raise cash for coups that had to be conjured in shares ten years ago. When nothing is off the scale financially, no rumour is too absurd to be plausible.
The thing in this bull market is that all the rumours are about bids. Nobody gossips about profit warnings any more. It is not that we have moved into a blessed world where there are no warnings and no need for them. Happily, they are fewer, but they are all real. It is the rumours that have stopped.
When they start again, beware. This three-year bull market will have blown itself out.
* *
To judge from the minutes of its February meeting, the Bank of England's monetary policy committee spent more time than usual this month talking about manufacturing industry. It has been accused in the past of letting industry sweat for fear of what might happen to house prices if interest rates were cut.
This time, committee members acknowledged that manufacturing output did fall by a clear percentage point in the fourth quarter of last year, worse than first indicated by National Statistics. But they then went on to note that surveys were more upbeat than the official numbers - so don't take those too tragically.
They then debated whether industry's recent weakness was cyclical - in which case it should right itself - or structural down to low-cost competition from emerging economies - in which case there is nothing much to be done.
One wonders what they may conclude from yesterday's CBI industrial trends survey. Industry is doing perceptibly better, but without winning the export orders it should. That points clearly to an over-priced pound. Higher US rates have not made a blind bit of difference.
