An equity security that is considered to have a permanent or quasi-permanent upward momentum. Hence it commands a price that bears no relationship to its past earning potential or other benchmarks. As historian and market participants understand, and as we shall see, these periods of unbridled optimism lead to delusion and excess, followed by pessimism and price collapse. But while American economic growth was being served, the practice of training people as property is yet another example of the critical reliance on the amoral world of economic. As planters, mill owner and New York merchants saw the possibility of larger and larger dollars returns, cotton and the slaves who cultivated it became almost synonymous. Thus the experience of a millions of black men and women became tied to the price of cotton, a suffocating relationship that would shape black life in America long after slavery’s end.