It’s a bizarro world out there. Seemingly on every front, whether geo-political, economic, or environmental, it is looking bleak. At least that’s what the Associated Press said on Sunday. The AP “right direction/wrong direction” question for the country is at a fifteen-year low. It seems that every casual conversation you have goes back to the price of gasoline, or food. Yes, right now this stuff hurts.

However, we are not officially in a recession, and you really don’t have to go back too far to remember record highs in the Dow and lots of people getting rich and feeling good. In fact it was Oct. 11, 2007 when the 30 industrials closed at 14,280, the highest level ever.

The markets have totally gone “Ravine Flyer” ever since. We’ve had the toxic punch of foreclosures, Bear Stearns bailout, the credit crunch with major bankers selling off parts of their companies to foreign royals, and the crazy run-up on oil. It has been a painful eight months.

It occurs to me that it didn’t have to be this way. Instead of fundamental conservative economics dictating our mortgage system, for example, we had greed and sloppy controls rule the day.

Right now, perhaps up to half of the stated price of oil is coming from the commodities investing that your and my pension managers are doing in an attempt to make money in a market that is all over the map. The scary part is that they have created a bubble and are convincing themselves that there is fundamental oil demand to back it up. I’m sorry, but I don’t see $140 a barrel sustainable, which means that your pension and mine might be the victims (?) of a crash.

The biggest shame is the dismal dollar. Back in the early aught’s, when the dollar was strong, U.S. manufacturers were complaining about the trade deficit due to our strong dollar making US goods cost more. Now that the dollar is weak, are we really seeing a windfall of exports correcting the trade imbalance, or are we in much of the same boat, due to the much higher cost of raw materials and the unfair money practices of China, et al?

Something else about all of this makes me feel queasy. I get this sense that part of this crisis of confidence has a lot to do with the 24-hour news cycle and the fact that we are in this much contested presidential race. Come on guys, are we really living 1929 or 1979 again? Aren’t we smarter than that?

In this bizarro world, we need some Men of Steel to cut through the noise and provide some real direction, focus, and sanity. And it needs to come “faster than a speeding bullet.”