Stampede!

The past few weeks mark the biggest churn in the history of the stock markets. First investors were stampeded to sell, sell, sell, resulting in a decline of 2400 points. Now they’re stampeded to buy. A run up of almost 1000 points. The game is afoot.

Churn, churn, churn. Brokerage houses are making money going both ways. The big guys are drooling as they jocky for position to harvest their trillion dollar windfall from the taxpayer. The rest of the herd are fighting each other to get in line for their own slaughter.

Clearly, even those who understand history are still doomed to repeat it. The logic of the unfettered marketplace is not difficult to undertand. In the long run, it always shakes out as a pyramid game. The markets rely on one truism. In the immortal words of P. T. Barnum, "There’s a sucker born every minute".

Note: A stampede is an act of mass impulse among herd animals or a crowd of people in which the herd collectively begins running irrationally toward or away from some stimulus.