Q: I guess most people would define a bubble as an extended period during which asset prices depart quite significantly from economic fundamentals.
A: That’s what I would think it is, but that means that somebody must have made a lot of money betting on that, if you could identify it. It’s easy to say prices went down, it must have been a bubble, after the fact.
I think most bubbles are twenty-twenty hindsight. Now after the fact you always find people who said before the fact that prices are too high.
People are always saying that prices are too high. When they turn out to be right, we anoint them. When they turn out to be wrong, we ignore them.
They are typically right and wrong about half the time…
I want people to use the term in a consistent way. For example, I didn’t renew my subscription to The Economist because they use the world bubble three times on every page. Any time prices went up and down—I guess that is what they call a bubble. People have become entirely sloppy.
People have jumped on the bandwagon of blaming financial markets. I can tell a story very easily in which the financial markets were a casualty of the recession, not a cause of it.
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