[A_D_E_P_T]

It's a confluence of factors, but the really big ones are, IMO, what I mentioned:

- ZIRP and similar policies essentially forced everybody to get into the stock market if they wanted to tread water.

- Then people saw with BTC (and similar, e.g. ETH,) that these so-called "market investments" don't need to be rooted in any kind of fundamental. They can be weightless tokens. This, in short order, lead to silly things like memestocks and NFTs -- but they also twisted the hell out of the markets. The valuation of TSLA has long been an example of this.

Then there's inflation, which has inflated stock market prices as much as it has inflated anything else. And there are toothless regulators who would deserve our sympathy if they weren't so lackadaisical. There are also llms, social media, etc. -- but those feed on the above.