KEY POINTS:
It was the morning after the night before and those who left the party early weren't offering much sympathy.
"They didn't see the Great Depression coming," muttered economist and millionaire philanthropist Gareth Morgan when another pundit played down the likelihood of things going from bad to worse.
The anti-Americans had a field day, mocking a country whose leaders threw tantrums and struck partisan poses in the face of catastrophe, as if years of talking in sound bites and dancing to the tune of lobbyists and focus groups have robbed them of their capacity to rise to the occasion.
Ditto the anti-capitalists, who saw the rescue package as proof that America's leaders no longer believe their own free-market rhetoric and the scale of the crisis as a hopeful sign that this isn't just another dizzying plunge on capitalism's big dipper ride, a bust between booms.
Both groups - and many of the most gleeful prophets of doom have dual membership - view these events as bearing out their long-held thesis that an empire founded on self-indulgence at home and self-delusion abroad was never built to last.
The mystics will be combing through Nostradamus and the Book of Revelations to see what happens next and no doubt the conspiracy theorists will soon be blogging that the Jews cashed up and got out weeks ago, just as they called in sick on 9/11.
Since deregulation global financial markets and Wall St in particular have been even more prone to losing their grip on reality. In 1996 Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan warned the markets that "irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values".
That triggered a sharp fall on most stock markets but Greenspan's caution soon faded from the collective consciousness. As Francis Wheen wrote in his invaluable book How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World:
"Over the next few years markets exhibited a madness not seen since the Dutch tulip craze of the 1630s and the South Sea bubble of 1720 as they succumbed to dotcom mania. Investors scrambled and jostled to buy shares in companies which, as often as not, had no earnings at all, nor any prospect of ever turning a profit."
Or as the economist Paul Krugman put it, "The future belonged to companies with no visible means of support."
Time-honoured principles of business and investment - and, for that matter, simple arithmetic - went out the window, replaced by snake oil, image management and sleight-of-hand accountancy.
The new breed of high rollers in the casino economy made the self-styled masters of the universe in Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities seem like chartered accountants as they leveraged off their unimaginable wealth and princely lifestyles to acquire rock star status and an aura of edgy iconoclasm.
There was Enron, whose chairman Kenneth Lay boasted of running the world's coolest company and seriously considered wrapping a gigantic pair of sunglasses around the headquarters in Houston.
Executives were exhorted to "learn the power of why", a piece of New Age blather encapsulating the cultism and fraudulence that underpinned the entire Enron scam.
There was Tiger Management, briefly the second-largest hedge fund in the world. At its zenith Tiger had assets worth $26 billion and paid Margaret Thatcher, one of the architects of deregulation, a salary of $1.45 million to attend five board meetings a year.
On a single day in October 1998, Tiger lost $2.9 billion speculating on the yen. Within 17 months it had ceased to exist.
Tiger's founder, Julian Robertson, might have been a model for the character of Eric Packer in Don DeLillo's 2003 novel Cosmopolis, set in New York on "the last day of the era - the golden age of cybercapital and rampant dreams of individual wealth".
Packer, who takes a similarly colossal and unwise punt on the Japanese yen, is a caricature of the restless and hubristic financial guru whose wealth disconnects him from reality. He lives in a 48-room midtown Manhattan apartment with a shark tank and a meditation room where he tries to sleep standing up, and travels in a decommissioned nuclear bomber.
It may seem over the top but then you read in last month's Vanity Fair about speculation in a new building on Central Park where eight-room apartments costing tens of millions trebled in value before buyers had even moved in.
A similar frenzy has taken place on Long Island where a property just like Jay Gatsby's - a mansion set in 16ha of beachfront - recently went for $150 million. The Great Gatsby was, among other things, a requiem for the Jazz Age and when the music died, the Great Depression set in.
