It does not take much intelligence to stampede, does it?

Stock markets are falling all over the world, wiping billions off market capitalization of companies. Central banks have been pouring money into banks, hoping to restart growth by forcing them to lend. When that did not work they cut interest rates to negative, which has made investors suspicious that they are hiding bad news. Analysts are trying to make sense of markets collapsing all round the world. It is China, or maybe the middle east, or the refugees pouring into Europe, or North Korea, or the falling price of crude, predicting a fall in global growth, or maybe it is the banks. Bankers have fiercely resisted any reforms of their practice of playing with depositors' money, so as to increase their profits and consequently their bonuses. Deutsche Bank has declared an eye-watering loss of 5.3 billion pounds leading to a sharp sell-off in banking stocks. They have been playing with Credit Default Swaps which started the rout in 2008. So jittery are the markets that oil price jumped 12.3% yesterday in the hope of a cut in output by the OPEC. Investors are dumping stocks and taking refuge in the safety of sovereign bonds which is driving yields into negative. Why do investors get surprised by the unexpected? It is because we have an imperfect understanding of the world around us which suffices as long things are normal but can find no explanation when they become different. However, one man has been consistently warning about the dangers of asset price bubbles due to the enormous liquidity central banks were pouring into the system. " However, Quantitative Easing and low interest rates do not generate new sources of growth, but simply borrow growth from the future, along with the costs that come with it - misallocation of credit, asset price bubbles and inequality, to name only a few," he wrote on 24 November. "....financial markets, far from disciplining errant policymakers as free-market ideologues would have us believe, merely allowed itself to be inebriated by the exuberance and hubris of central bankers," on 15 December. In other words, dodgy deals. " Investors are confused. They have no right to be. They ought to be concerned. But they are not," on 29 December. And after markets started falling he wrote on 2 February," Corporate executives have engaged in financial engineering to boost stock prices so that their compensation rises. Stock prices have become untethered from fundamentals. Bubbles have to burst and they do so of their own accord." Has India done any better? Pundits were prodding us to invest in shares, predicting a level of 30,000 for the Sensex. Today they are talking of sinking to 15,000. Pundits should read before lecturing us. But then they would not be pundits,would they?