The ‘Greedometer’ Flashes Red

” “Danger, the emergency destruct sequence has now been activated. The ship will self-destruct in t-minus, ten minutes. The option to override automatic detonation will expire in t-minus, five minutes…” — Mother, “Alien” (1979)

Have you ever felt like Ripley — Sigourney Weaver — at the end of Alien? After the monster has wiped out all of her fellow crew members, she decides to kill it by blowing up her spaceship, the Nostromo. She sets the ship’s self-destruct mechanism and races for the escape shuttle — only to find the alien now blocking her way.

The next few minutes are a hair-raising race against time. As Ripley barrels back through the long corridors of the space ship, “Mother,” the voice of the ship’s computer, ominously counts down the time left until everything will go kaboom in a blinding, space-bending explosion.

The stock market feels a little like this. The higher it goes, the more euphoric the cheerleading, the more the airheaded Gamma-class humans put on the happy face and hum their way to work, the more terrifying it becomes for anyone who actually bothers thinking. (Luckily, this excludes most of Wall Street). At best we feel like Jones, the ship’s cat, getting banged around in a portable cage.

I hate to state the obvious, but stocks are just a claim on companies’ future dividends. That’s it. By definition, the higher they rise in price, the worse a deal they are. (I am amazed this is ever a subject of debate, as it is a tautology). Mom and Pop, with an instinct for self-preservation which suggests human beings are descended from the lemmings, usually pile on board at the peak.

Is it happening again?…”

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