When the DOW tanked on Tuesday (2/27), losing over 400 points, the comparison du jour was to the Black Monday crash of October 19, 1987 - which was of course silly, as the former was only a 3.3% loss in value, while the latter was 22.6%.

Nonetheless, it prompts me to tell you a story, which starts in the Chang Tang Plateau of northern Tibet.  That's where I was at the time of '87 crash, leading an overland expedition from Beijing to Kathmandu across Tibet north to south. 

We heard about the crash from BBC broadcasts on my short wave radio.  One expedition member, Big John Perrott, had a panic attack.  Having no way to reach his broker - northern Tibet is about as remote as you get - he thought he was bankrupt.

By the time we got to Lhasa by the end of the month, and John could call his broker, the market - and his portfolio - were well into recovery.  He said he'll be forever grateful for being in the Chang Tang on Black Monday.

But while I was in Tibet on Black Monday, a good friend of mine was in a meeting at the White House.

China's stock market boom has reached outright mania, with equities galloping higher at a parabolic rate, despite threats of a crackdown by regulators and the continued slowdown of the national economy.

The Shanghai Composite Index has risen 32% in the past six weeks, blowing through 3,000 to a three-and-a-half-year high even though corporate earnings are declining steeply.

The China Securities Regulatory Commission said late last week that it would "increase market supervision, resolutely crack down and earnestly safeguard normal market order." It warned that stock manipulators had been "raising their head" and would be dealt with.

The cautionary words have been ignored by retail investors as they throng brokerage offices, lured by momentum trades. For the stock boom comes as Chinese industry battles with massive overcapacity in everything from steel to shipbuilding, coal output, cement and solar panels.

The bottom line is that it may be impossible for China to deflate its epic bubble painlessly.

Would you have traded five terrorists for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl?

The decision may have been wrong or right, but what is striking is that President Obama seems to have made this decision, and all too many others, in an ad hoc way, rather than using decision theory.

Decision theory is an orderly way of thinking and choosing among alternatives when there is a number of variables for which the probabilities of each may or may not be known to the decision-maker. It's the opposite of Mr. Obama's thought process.

Politicians and criminals both have a tendency to underestimate the probability of getting caught in bad acts. Is it because few studied decision theory or because there is a certain recklessness in the nature of those who follow such pursuits?

Obviously it's the latter in Mr. Obama's case, who suffers from what is known as The Fatal Conceit.

Suppose there's a Mafia Don.  Not a benign and pro-American Marlon Brando Godfather, but a ruthless brutal gangster who hates America and holds a bottomless grudge against her.

Let's suppose this Mafioso has amassed an enormous personal fortune of ill-gotten gains.  Stashed away in hidden bank accounts and assets all over the world, his net worth exceeds 20 billion dollars - billion with a ‘b'.

But say that's just his personal stash.  Say the total amount of money his gang has accumulated is 300 billion - almost a third of a trillion dollars in cash.  Say he controls it.

Let's finally suppose that this centibillionaire anti-American gangster has an arsenal of several thousand nuclear bombs, most of them in the nose cones of intercontinental missiles aimed at us.

If there were such a man, shouldn't we be a bit more worried about him than a bankrupt midget in Persia without a single real nuke to his name?

For there is indeed such a man.  His name is Vladimir Putin, President of Russia.

Saudi Arabia and the core OPEC states are taking an immense political gamble by letting crude oil prices crash to $66 a barrel, if their aim is to shake out the weakest shale producers in the US.

"The resilience of US shale may prove greater than the resilience of OPEC," said Alistair Newton, head of political risk at Nomura.

There is no question that the US has entirely changed the global energy landscape and poses an existential threat to OPEC. America has cut its net oil imports by 8.7m bpd since 2006, equal to the combined oil exports of Saudi Arabia and Nigeria.

OPEC has misjudged the threat. As late as last year, it was dismissing US shale as a flash in the pan. Abdalla El-Badri, the group's secretary-general, still insists that half of all US shale output is vulnerable below $85.

This is bravado. US producers have locked in higher prices through derivatives contracts. Noble Energy and Devon Energy have both hedged over three-quarters of their output for 2015.

Further, efficiency is improving and drillers are switching to lower-cost spots, confronting OPEC with a moving target. "The (price) floor is falling and is not nearly as firm as the Saudi view assumes," says Citigroup.

Without fracking of oil and gas deposits, there would have been no economic growth in the U.S. over the past five years. Yet the oil and gas industry has been a favorite whipping boy of the environmental zealots both inside and outside of the administration.

Without those brilliant entrepreneurs and engineers in the private sector who developed the new techniques to unlock massive amounts of oil and gas at reasonable cost, it is unlikely that President Obama would have been re-elected - for it is they who have kept his economy afloat.

Mr. Obama owes his renewed presidency to the very people he gives his back of the hand to.  Is there no end to the irony of this president?