Some people are borderline, sure, but some others you just know are crazy. We're talking about those folks who so obviously have a hole in their marble bag that any additional evidence of severe mental illness is purely superfluous. For instance, does anyone really need to see a doctor's report to believe that, say, Charles Manson is a few credits short of his diploma from Sanity High? Ditto that rainbow-wig John 3:16 guy, damn near anybody who willingly appears on Springer, and Michael Dell. But when it comes to the epitome of sheer irrationality and wack-job behavior, we look no further than that endearingly unhinged institution known as Wall Street.

Now, anyone who follows Apple's stock price knows full well that Wall Street is clearly six or eight quarts shy of a full brain tank. Any institution that regularly punishes a company for reporting higher-than-expected earnings by slashing the price of its stock has some serious issues that need to be resolved, no doubt-- and we needn't even mention all the erratic behavior regarding that whole dot-com thing, right? But while we don't need any further evidence of Wall Street's inherent looniness, it's more than happy to give it to us anyway. Case in point: the way that, after Apple's earnings warning, the company's stock price fell through the floor, crashed into the basement, bored through the earth's crust, and is currently resting somewhere in the planet's creamy liquid center.

Granted, Apple's little admission of "Oops! We built a computer that no one's buying! Our bad" should be expected to trigger a bit of a stock beating, but, irrational creature that Wall Street is, AAPL was butchered out of all proportion to the facts at hand. And now that the anti-anti-Apple media backlash to the backlash is starting to kick in, some observers far more astute than our sleep-deprived selves are only too happy to point out the absurdity of the situation. As faithful viewer Will Findlay notes, Robert Cringely has chimed in with his two cents on the sitch-- and he makes a very interesting point about why AAPL is currently undervalued beyond the bounds of reason.

Cringely (who has definitely not always been an Apple cheerleader in the past, despite having worked for the company early on-- so you can take his latest column as a reasonably impartial assessment) makes this one simple observation: after the post-earnings-warning bloodbath, Apple's market capitalization had been nuked to a mere $4 billion or so. And yet Apple has $5 billion in cash. Meaning that Wall Street thinks everything Apple's got in addition to its cash is actually worth negative one billion dollars. That means that if Apple were to give away all its cash and then put the company up for sale, Disney would demand a billion dollars from Steve just to take the company off his hands. And why? Because Apple will only make $100 million this quarter. Yes, that's surely a sign of a company with one foot in the grave...

An interesting corollary to this intriguing little fact: if Cringely's numbers are right, Apple could theoretically buy back every single share of its own stock-- and still have a billion in cash left over when it was through. Sort of puts things into perspective, doesn't it? Whoops, here comes Wall Street... quick, you go call the men in white coats, and we'll wait here with the giant butterfly net.