Enjoying the ride?

Millennium Force at Cedar Point in Sandusky, Ohio, is just that...a force. The roller coaster is 310' tall, propels riders at speeds up to 93 mph, and will cause the faint of heart to stain their underwear.

Kind of like the stock market, lately. Let's ride it together, shall we?



This coaster is different from others in several ways. The lift hill starts the instant you leave the station, and it's unnaturally steep. Intamin uses a cable lift system to pull the car up at a 45-degree angle (and believe you me, you'd swear it's closer to 65 degrees...at fifteen miles an hour.

Fifteen miles an hour may seem sluggish. It isn't. You're over three hundred feet in the air in twenty five seconds flat. By comparison, the Magnum XL-200 at the same park, using a traditional chain lift system, requires over twice as long to pull the train up 205 feet.

Millennium Force's relatively speedy ascent can only be accomplished with technological help: in this case, a cable that is much lighter than the usual chain used on most coasters. Likewise, the ascent of the stock market since 2008 could have only been accomplished with the infusion of vast sums of something I'll call "mun".

"Mun" is different from "money" in that it is, in effect, lighter. It's printed out of thin air, usually in quantities too large to be grasped by most imaginations. It's backed by nothing other than a promise...something that may not be overly comforting when you're dangling 310' in the air overlooking the relative stability in Canada (which, incidentally, you can actually see from the top of Millennium's lift hill).

Standard and Poor's is the first to question the validity of that promise, and they surely won't be the last. Canada lost its AAA rating in 1992 and it took ten years of diligent governance to regain it. "Diligent governance" does not exactly describe the current state of U.S. affairs. In fact, I get the feeling that if guns were permitted in Congress there'd be a bloodbath.

Pulled up by all that mun, we find ourselves at the peak, 310 feet in the air, or 12,876 stock points. Notice how while we were climbing, it was very easy to maintain the illusion we'd climb forever. But as we crest the hill (a titch slower now, without the mun to buoy us) we're buffeted by wind and holy shit it's a long way down.

The descent is precipitous: 80 degrees, or over a thousand points in the last seven sessions. Looking ahead we can see an overbanked turn some wag has nicknamed the "Dead Cat Bounce"; beyond that, we'll only know when we get there. But, this being a roller-coaster of historical proportions, we can expect a few things.

1) Airtime. On coaster tracks, this is the sensation of weightlessness, of being pulled out of your seat by zero or negative g-forces. It can cause you to lose your lunch. In the U.S. right now, airtime is what's being consumed by both parties in a frantic effort to affix blame, rather than fixing the problem. The air here is almost all of the "hot" variety. This, too, can cause you to lose your lunch.

2) Dark tunnels. On coasters, people like to scream in these. Ditto in stock markets.

3) The most certain thing we can assume is that we will finish this roller coaster ride at a considerably lower altitude than we were at its peak. Some people will undoubtedly lose wallets or portfolios.

Most of us will disembark this bugger shaken up. Some will vow never to ride again. Others will get off and head to some other, putatively tamer coaster, say blue chip Blue Streak. Let's just hope that we can learn to sort out money from its lighter counterpart. Because if the speed gets too high, we'll fly right off the track.

Keep your head back, your arms and legs inside the train at all times, and enjoy the ride...