And Great was the fall thereof . . .

This well worn parable found in the holy book may best describe the times.

As a child we would spend hours at the kitchen table building card houses. My brothers could get 3 and sometimes 4 levels high before it came crashing down. The thing that stands out is the wreckage.

When a building crumbles there are often left half collapsed roofs, teetering walls, and piles of debris. It’s fairly easy to work back through the wreckage and determine the cause of failure. But in the card house, it falls flat. The once magnificent towering house, vanishes in an instant. No way to determine the failure, or who to blame.

I think of all the bad business news and can’t understand how the stock market continues to rise. It’s beautiful, majestic and marvelous, but will it withstand the winds of time?