Maybe the stock market is some sort of doomsday machine. We’ve so contorted and perverted capitalism and the good qualities of markets, focusing everything on the gambling house that is Wall Street, that now we can’t stop. The lunacy of the stock market surging into the unknown, discounting the possibility of anything every going wrong in the future, even as we still struggle with one of the biggest negative surprises in history, this lunacy has gotten so great that even the usual cheerleaders are publicly scratching their heads. i used to think that you could dismiss “irrational exuberance” as just that, bettors on a winning streak creating their own reality until real reality reasserted itself. Now I’m not so sure. Maybe this big machine, capitalism, sucking in and incorporating everything in its path until it sustains itself more on psychology, morality, and devotion than it ever did on innovation, competition and production, is just a,–what’s the right metaphor here–runaway train, unstoppable tornado, so that the system which has engineered itself to concentrate the wealth in fewer and fewer hands up to the point at which even the individual wealth holders start protesting, and yet, like Mr. Creosote they have no choice but to keep swallowing until the lunacy eventually explodes. Have we entered a hpase in which everyone knows the awful outcome but is powerless to steer around it?