Major cyclical turning points tend to feature large numbers of people doing and saying what in retrospect turn out to be amazingly dumb things. Think GM highlighting its line of Hummers just before an oil price spike bankrupts the company. Or half the world betting that tech stocks with infinite P/E ratios would keep rising in 2000. Or pretty much everything that was said and done in the housing market in 2006.

Today’s financial bubble is vastly bigger and more wide-spread than any of its predecessors, so the stupidity is correspondingly global and varied. Some examples:

GM bets big (again!) on gas guzzlers

General Motors third-quarter earnings widely beat expectations

(CNBC) – General Motors reported much higher-than-expected third-quarter earnings on strong North American truck and SUV sales, calming fears that a U.S. auto market slowdown would dent profitability. Overall, GM said third-quarter net income more than doubled to $2.8 billion, or $1.76 a share, from a year earlier.

Rival Ford Motor, due to release third-quarter results Thursday, warned in July that a slowing U.S. auto market would put its full-year profit forecast at risk.

The contrast between the GM and Ford outlooks in part reflects different bets on oil prices in the past. Ford during the past decade spent heavily to boost the efficiency of its top-selling F-series pickup truck by engineering a light, aluminum body, cut back production of large sport utilities and focused on small- and medium-sized cars.

Ford executives have told analysts that with gasoline prices relatively low, it is harder to recover the costs of fuel-saving technology from consumers.

GM stuck with the large SUV market, and now controls more than 70 percent of that market in North America. Models such as the Cadillac Escalade start at more than $70,000.

GM’s results and its outlook depend primarily on strong U.S. and Chinese economies. The company said it lost money in Europe, South America and in Asian markets outside of China.