This past weekend, Spirit Airlines stopped flying.

If you've spent any time in a U.S. airport over the past decade, you know Spirit. The bright yellow planes. The $39 fares. The one your college kid took home for spring break and your in-laws used because the Christmas trip wasn't going to pay for itself in business class. It wasn't fancy. But it worked. And for tens of millions of Americans who couldn't afford the alternative, it kept air travel within reach.

Now it's gone. Seventeen thousand people lost their jobs overnight.

Officially, Spirit went down on long-running financial troubles — bad management, a failed JetBlue merger, the structural pain of the budget-airline model. All true. The company had been wobbling for years.

But wobbling is not dead. What pushed Spirit over the edge was crude above $100 and jet fuel — refined directly from crude — going right along with it. On margins as thin as a budget airline runs, a sustained 40% jump in your single largest input cost isn't a headwind. It's a guillotine.

So really, what killed Spirit Airlines was the war.

Two Americas

And yet, if you were sitting at a trading desk in Manhattan today, you'd hardly know any of this happened.

The S&P 500 — the headline number Wall Street treats as the economy — just printed an all-time high. Over 7,300. Up roughly 11% in the past month alone.

The Shiller P/E ratio (basically a long-term measure of how expensive stocks are relative to actual earnings) sits at 41 — the second-highest reading this measure has ever recorded, beaten only by the dot-com peak of 2000. As I told you in a recent essay, every single time this ratio has held above 30 for more than two months, the market has dropped between 20% and 89%. No exceptions. And of course, we're way past two months.

Meanwhile, in real America — the one that doesn't sit in front of a Bloomberg terminal — the picture looks nothing like that.

For starters, U.S. food inflation recently hit 7.9% year over year. Tomatoes up 102%. Vegetables up 90%.