Bruno Bertez
June 26, 2026
Volatility no longer tells us anything meaningful about underlying economic reality. Instead, it exposes with brutal clarity the perverse transformation of contemporary financial markets.
Across every major asset class — oil, gold, technology stocks, the dollar, and interest rates — markets now drift without any defined intrinsic value.
Everything has become unanchored, frivolous, and detached from any objective reference point. The very concept of the “fundamental” has ceased to be an operational category.When all valuations float freely, detached from economic substance, power shifts decisively.
Prices fall under the control of the strongest players, animal spirits, random sentiment, and pure speculation.
The classic function of markets and prices — to provide clear signals about the future and serve as reliable guides for rational decision-making — has effectively disappeared.
Markets no longer perform any genuine economic role.What remains is a distorted mechanism whose primary activity is no longer the rational discovery and exploitation of value, but the systematic exploitation of collective passions, emotions, and credulity.
Stupidity is no longer merely a flaw in human judgment: it has become the central emotional engine driving price formation.
This is the logical outcome of a postmodern financial order in which the link between cause and effect has been severed.
In such a world, effort and reward, risk and return, reality and representation no longer correspond.
Everything appears to “fall from the sky,” rewarding those who best navigate narratives, momentum, and crowd psychology rather than those who correctly assess economic fundamentals.
The implications are profound.
Investors and policymakers alike are navigating a hall of mirrors where volatility is no longer a measure of risk rooted in real economic developments, but a symptom of a system that has lost its moorings.
In this environment, apparent stability can mask extreme fragility, and violent price swings become the norm rather than the exception.
We are witnessing the final stage of a long process: the replacement of fundamental analysis by performative storytelling, the triumph of liquidity over solvency, and the subordination of economic reality to financial spectacle. Until this disconnection is acknowledged and addressed, markets will continue to amplify distortions rather than resolve them.
The age of frivolous finance is not merely unstable — it is structurally irrational. And volatility, far from being noise, has become its loudest and most honest signal.
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