This compulsion to explain arises with clocklike regularity every time a stock market closes and a journalist says something like “The Dow rose ninety-five points today on news that …” A quick check will often reveal that the news that supposedly drove the market came out well after the market had risen. But that minimal level of scrutiny is seldom applied. It’s a rare day when a journalist says, “The market rose today for any one of a hundred different reasons, or a mix of them, so no one knows.”
