Panic stations: Sad-Looking Hands-On-Face Guy has become the icon of our era of gnawing financial anxiety. Photograph: Daniel Barry/Getty Images

The last few weeks have been truly terrible ones for the financial markets. But that's just another way of saying they have been excellent weeks for the British blog Brokers With Hands On Their Faces, and its American cousin Sad Guys On Trading Floors, both of which exist to chronicle the news media's chronic overuse of stock pictures and video footage of stressed-looking men in blue shirts or jackets, standing in front of impossibly complex charts on plasma monitors, their hands on their foreheads, over their mouths, or under their chins, looking stricken or defeated or simply numb. Very occasionally it's not a man, and slightly less occasionally the shirt isn't blue. But you undoubtedly recognise the cliche: Sad-Looking Hands-On-Face Guy has become the icon of our era of gnawing financial anxiety, the blue-shirt-wearing omen of our economic doom.

THIS MAN SPEAKS FOR US ALL !

Attila The Stockbroker




............................................