With market intelligence being communicated instantaneously, and with trades managed by sophisticated hedge-fund algorithms, not to mention financial instruments which can be applied under any conditions, the market is now reacting pretty much without human control. Of course, there was always only the most fragile human control, but now built-in mechanisms exploit every nuance of the economy totally independent of human intervention.

A perfect market in which there is total knowledge and predictability is possible except for external factors (war, natural disaster, etc). In a perfect market, margins get cut to a razor thin edge, response is immediate, there is no reserve capacity, and the slightest perturbation can set off a cascade which will propagate throughout the system. The feed-back mechanisms will not have enough buffer to exert leverage against. It all becomes unstable, and with no one really in charge, anything could initiate a catastrophic collapse. It would be instantaneous change of state, like degenerate electron pressure core collapse in a supergiant star.

The other alternative, that the market is complex and robust enough to
guarantee its own survival through its own internal feedback processes, suggests that the market may be very stable indeed, but that it will no longer serve human needs and instead adjust itself to ensure its own self- perpetuation. Perhaps the great fugue we have all suspected won't be a machine intelligence after all, it will be an administrative identity. A bureaucratic consciousness. Frankenstein's monster will not be flesh and blood, or metal and silicon, it will be capital, circulating and reproducing in cyberspace.