I agree in that I don't believe the market has ever really recovered from the collapse of the dot com boom and until a "new" industry comes along to suck up capital long-term and produce some new winners (I can remember watching when Amazon had its first profitable quarter on CNBC, to show how much of a fucking nerd I was as a child) we will be stuck with bouts of severe sell offs intermittently.
I don't agree that we're going to see 2008: the remix anytime soon. ffs, am I the only one who remembers just how much wishful thinking there was at the Federal Reserve level back then?
As a rule I don't believe anything anyone has to say about China. Not because I'm a true believer in Deng Xiaoping Thought, but simply because the reliability of available information is very suspect, and when it's something incontrovertible (for example, the recent Shanghai exchange trouble) it's conceptualized in the crudest manner so as to be almost worthless. (Investment in China is nothing as far reaching as a financialized western economy, to continue the exchange example.)
I'm not entirely dismissive of the oil thing, especially in the employing economy of the U.S. (to a certain extent I view it as something similar to the old housing industry, a creature of get rich quick myopia at the legislative level, no benji), but the nice thing about oil is that everyone has got to buy it, and if it gets cheaper that means everyone has more money to spend (at least until markets adjust), people who aren't occupants of only certain segments of the economy. Cheaper energy is not a back breaker (in a systemic sense), just look at the golden ages of capitalism if you don't believe me.
tl; dr I'm never really high on minority interest securities as anything but a source of passive income (e.g. dividends), boom or bust, and you (pejorative) shouldn't be either.