One of the overarching characteristics of asset markets is that its participants are prone to harbour the eternal Doublethink whereby the consensus usually revolves around a sempiternal bullishness with regard to equity prices and an equally unshakable millenarian gloom regarding the wider prospects for the human race.
With regard to the latter, it should be recalled that, only a few short years ago, the media were overly solicitous of the morbid declamations of both Hubbert’s Peak Malthusians and their lesser brethren who saw naught in prospect but depleted mineral seams and planetary-scale dustbowls. All of this ilk were much given to tortured Old Testament visions of an imminent, resource-exhausted Dystopia were we not instantly to repent of our unrighteousness and sin and to follow their always anti-economic and frequently anti-scientific prescriptions for society instead.