The definitive academic rebuttal to this sort of market worship--to Hendrickson's assertion that "the oil market has been completely rational"--would have to be Benoit Mandelbrot's The (Mis)Behavior of Markets. Mandelbrot often compares markets to the weather--turbulent, unpredictable, wild.

Katrina gave us the perfect metaphor of where the blind adherance to market theology leads us. Mandebrot published his book in 2004, well before Katrina or the market meltdown of 2007-2008. But the devastation wrecked upon those who ignore, or deny, the nature of either weather or the markets, and fail to prepare for either of them, is extreme:

Multifractals make turbulance a fundamentally new way of analyzing finance. Markets no longer appear in the entirely rational, well-behaved patterns of past financial theorists. They are seen for what they are: dyanamic, unpredictable, and sometimes dangerous systems for transferring wealth and power, systems as important for us to understand as the wind, the rain, and the flood. And floods--natural or manmade--need defenses. Machiavelli once saw fortune as a flood, and his metaphor is apt here.

I like her [Fortune] to one of these violent rivers which, when they become enraged, flood the plains, run the trees and the buildings, lift earth from this part, drop in another; each person flees before them, everyone yields to their impetus without being able to hinder them in any regard. And although they [rivers] are like this, it is not as if men, when times are quiet, could not provide for them with dikes and dams so that when they rise later, either they go by a canal or their impetus is neither so wanton nor so damaging.

From The Prince

The financiers and investors of the world are, at the moment, like mariners who heed no weather warnings. This book is such a warning.

Benoit Mandelbrot, The Mis(Behavior) of Markets