How delicious it is when a president's wife, massively humiliated and forced to assume the Tammy Wynette role she once disdained, is not scorned but embracedby the public. How delightful when her opponent, a pontificating New York City mayor, his bid for the Senate crippled by cancer and revelations of philandering, finds himself rising in the polls even as he decides to bow out. How whimsical are those commercials poking fun at the ad business. I want to have fun. Jedediah Purdy be damned.
Financial irony is inevitable.
Inthis agora, the price of what you buy and sell need bear no implacable relationship to any tangibles. While that sounds like good old Viennese subjective valuation, this market doesn't waltz to any theories of market efficiency or rational expectations. Traders watched other traders making for the door and decided they'd better beat them to it. Shiller, however, has his title wrong. In the postmodern market, irrational exuberance is rational.