The Rules Were Never Meant for Us: Understanding the Market’s Game

Money is a language, but most of us are not fluent. We move through the world knowing the cost of bread, the worth of an hour’s labor, the price of a roof over our heads. These things feel real, solid. But beyond them lies a financial world that operates in shadows, whispering in the dialect of basis points and derivatives, a realm where wealth is conjured and vanishes in ways we cannot see. We stand at its gates, illiterate in its ways, feeling its weight on our backs without ever laying eyes on the levers that move it.

T.S. Eliot once wrote of “vast impersonal forces” that shape our lives, indifferent to our will. The financial market is such a force. A shift in interest rates, a fluctuation in the stock market—these things ripple outward, deciding who will own a home, who will retire in comfort, who will struggle to pay rent. But the power behind these forces is not always visible. As Michel-Rolph Trouillot reminds us, power is most effective when it hides itself, when it shapes the world without announcing its presence. We do not see the hands that design financial products to confuse us, that profit from our uncertainty, that keep us as perpetual borrowers rather than owners.

And so, we remain strangers in a system that determines our future. The financial market does not behave the way we expect. Unemployment rises, and yet the stock market climbs. Wages stagnate, but corporate profits soar. It is as if the economy plays by rules meant for someone else, its rewards given not to those who toil but to those who already hold the keys. Without financial literacy, we are not merely left behind—we are, in a way, erased. And yet, the market does not need us to understand it to keep moving. Like all vast impersonal forces, it simply carries on.

You might even be tempted to believe there are no rules at all—that the financial markets are less like a system and more like a storm, wild and directionless, tearing through economies without warning. And you would not be wrong to think so. One day, the stock market soars with no apparent wind beneath its wings; the next, it collapses, dragging entire industries, pensions, and livelihoods down with it. Maybe you remember the Internet stock frenzy of the late ’90s, when money poured into companies that had never turned a profit, only for it all to come crashing down in 2000. Or maybe you recall the real estate boom of the 2000s, a bubble so vast that when it finally burst, it left behind the worst recession in two generations.

We, as Haitians, know cycles. We have seen the price of rice and oil double in a matter of weeks. We have watched as one government falls, another rises, and yet, somehow, the streets remain the same. We have learned to navigate instability with the wisdom of our ancestors—turning to sòl and eskwad when banks refuse to lend, trusting community over institutions that have failed us time and again. We know that some seasons bring rain, and others bring drought, that today’s plenty can vanish overnight.

But financial markets? They move to a rhythm that feels foreign, untouched by the realities we know. They boom for reasons that escape us and collapse in ways that seem senseless. And when they fall, they do not just take down corporations and hedge funds—they take homes, retirements, the dreams of entire generations. A kay that took years to build, gone in a foreclosure. A lifetime of savings, erased overnight.

And so, I would not blame you for thinking that the financial market is a world you can never truly enter, a language you will never speak. But I do not believe that is true. Financial literacy is not some distant, unattainable skill—it is closer than you think. The market, for all its chaos, is not ungoverned. It is not some lawless void. It operates within the same economic rules that shape every other market, even the informal ones we know so well. The principles that guide a sòl—trust, timing, shared risk—are not so different from those that move the stock market.

We may never be able to predict its every move, never fully tame its wild swings, but we can learn its logic. We can understand the forces that move it, the tools that build and break fortunes. And so, we will walk through the cycles and the crashes, the booms and the busts, and we will name the instruments that make them possible. We will pull back the curtain, just enough to see how the machine works. And once you see it—once you understand it—you will never look at the market the same way again.