I don’t put too much stock in the market.

The primary emotions guiding the stock market are fear and greed, and its wild fluctuations (or undeniable trends) have only the most tenuous correlation with reality. Sure, what happens on Wall Street has some connection with national and global economic health, but it isn’t always clear just how or why. The “market analysts”, economists and other financial experts who pontificate on all this have too much at stake in the system itself to be believed–much of what they say sounds a lot more like justification and rationalization than insight; they have too much at stake in keeping everyone convinced the financial system makes sense to make any sense of it themselves.

Right now, stock markets all over the world are in a free fall, how much of this is due to panic and self-fulfilling prophecy and how much is related to real economic conditions is anyone’s guess. We are told that the world and US economies are fundamentally sound, even booming, so there is no real reason for this bursting bubble to reflect anything in reality. Or is there? Remember, you can’t trust these guys, and their collective failures to foresee past financial catastrophes is only too well documented. I have no idea what is happening, and I suspect no one else knows either. Its all bullshit, and anyone who tells you otherwise probably has too much skin in the game to be trusted to tell you the truth, or even to believe it if he’s seen it.

But something is happening. Its like the old main-frame computers of the 1960s and 70s. Many of them were equipped with panels of flashing lights, each connected to a specific register or circuit, relay or switch inside. During normal operations, the tiny bulbs would flash on and off in random patterns. It was possible to see waves of internal events manifested in the behavior of these light displays.

But there were those technicians, men with long experience with these machines, who claimed they could intuitively gauge the health of the machine by the way the patterns of blinking grain-of-rice bulbs fired and extinguished. They couldn’t explain how or why they knew, but they swore they could tell when the system was about to crash, slow down, seize up or go into an endless loop, thrashing about helplessly. Long before ALL the lights turned on (or off) at once, they could sense something terrible was about to happen.