From "It Ain't Me Babe" Dylan, to Hendrix

“This decade has already seen burst bubbles in tech stocks, homes and credit. Now, it seems, another segment has fallen victim to irrational exuberance: the U.S. auto market.

“Like investors who sent dot-com stocks or house prices to unsustainable levels, auto manufacturers in the U.S. have pushed their sales volumes to new peaks over the past decade. They invited customers to buy cars at employee prices, extended no-interest loans for up to six years and sold unprecedented numbers of vehicles to rental fleets -- all strategies that some analysts say drove U.S. auto sales to artificial highs.

“Through most of the 1990s, auto makers sold a little over 15 million cars and light trucks a year in the U.S. market. That changed in the late 1990s: With gasoline prices low and many U.S. consumers feeling flush from the tech-stock boom, auto sales surged. Sales peaked at 17.4 million in 2000 and remained near 17 million for another five years. Heads of General Motors Corp. and Toyota said the U.S. was entering a golden age of the automobile. In 2003, Toyota's head of North American sales predicted the industry would soon be selling 20 million vehicles a year.

“They were wrong. Sales started falling in 2006 and this year are expected to be right back where they were in the 1990s, at just over 15 million...

“The slump in auto sales is already complicating the turnaround efforts of the Big Three -- GM, Ford Motor Co. and Chrysler LLC -- and pinching the earnings of foreign auto makers including Toyota Motor Corp. and Nissan Motor Co.

“A bubble occurs when market participants push prices of assets -- stocks, homes, tulips -- higher than their intrinsic values would appear to merit. While the auto-industry doesn't fit the classic formula of an asset bubble, a similar degree of mania was apparently at work: Makers believed they could sell vehicles in much greater numbers than the market would ultimately bear.

“GM spokesman Tony Cervone said the company didn't overestimate demand and blamed the current sales slump on the U.S. economy's slowdown. Earlier in the decade, he said, trends in household income and spending power all pointed toward steady growth.”

(“Rear View: Car Makers' Boom Years Now Look Like a Bubble.” Neal E. Boudette and Norihiko Shirouzu. Wall Street Journal: May 20, 2008. pg. A.1)

BLAME SOMEBODY ELSE. You did all you could. Exogenous factors are not within your control, so how could you be responsible for your actions? Everything you wanted to look at pointed the way toward doing what you wanted to do, and what you wanted to believe.

So what else could we expect? Don't we yearn for the narcotic that success is intrinsic while struggles are extrinsic?

From mania to depression, Hendrix said it best:

“Manic depression is a frustrating mess.”