NEW YORK—New York Stock Exchange officials released a statement Monday admitting that the exchange, one of the primary means by which the nation’s economic health is measured, is in reality a made-up and largely random mishmash of numbers and meaningless statistics. "The whole ‘stock exchange’ idea came about around the turn of the century at the request of publisher William Randolph Hearst, who was looking for something to fill the back half of his New York Journal," NYSE’s Ian Silver said. "So a man named Henry Tillman came up with the idea of a ‘stock-ticker’ device, which spewed out reams of bogus numbers for Hearst to reprint." NYSE has no plans to disband.