Are we in another bubble about to burst?

Travis

Misanthrope of the Mountains
Joined
Mar 31, 2007
Messages
24,133
Call me crazy, not an entirely inaccurate claim, but I'm getting a kind of twitchy feeling about our current stock market. A very similar feeling to what I had back in 2006 about property values. I just don't really see anything substantial happening with the companies who have stocks soaring day after day to justify the rise.

Is this all irrational investing? Is this a bubble about to pop?
 
Call me crazy, not an entirely inaccurate claim, but I'm getting a kind of twitchy feeling about our current stock market. A very similar feeling to what I had back in 2006 about property values. I just don't really see anything substantial happening with the companies who have stocks soaring day after day to justify the rise.

Is this all irrational investing? Is this a bubble about to pop?

Actually the upcoming tax cuts will be a huge gift for Wall street. It means a lot of cash going into a bunch of already profitable companies, who will then use that money for stock buybacks, raising prices.

They won't use the money to expand, hire more workers, or raise wages of course, since there is already plenty of money available to them in the form of high profits and low bond rates. If they are not growing their workforce, it is because they don't want to.
 
Call me crazy, not an entirely inaccurate claim, but I'm getting a kind of twitchy feeling about our current stock market. A very similar feeling to what I had back in 2006 about property values. I just don't really see anything substantial happening with the companies who have stocks soaring day after day to justify the rise.

Is this all irrational investing? Is this a bubble about to pop?

Impossible to say. Daddy Don used to be interested in this kind of thing and pulled a lot of his savings out of the market when his spidey-senses were tingling. This meant that he missed the 2008/09 market falls, then again he also missed the 1999/2007 market gains.

As Random has pointed out, companies are very profitable and and using those profits to reward shareholders through a combination of dividends and share buy-backs. This will tend to support stock prices.
 
They were saying today on British TV that the upward movement of the Dow is because Trump's proposed tax cuts have been factored into the Wall Street stock market. I suppose the idea is that the extra money in people's pockets will be speculated on the stock market.

It has been said in the past that the 1929 crash was caused because people borrowed too much cheap money and then speculated it on Wall Street. It sounds like Las Vegas to me. Historically, I have heard of the South Sea bubble and the Dutch tulip bubble which resulted in losses in business for many people, though it seems some people like Sir Robert Walpole got out in time.

I don't pretend to offer any investment advice and the financial community is not my field. I just feel that all this deregulation of the banks has resulted in financial instability. It's not the billionaires who have to pay for it. They expect governments to bail them out and for it to paid for by others.
 
Call me crazy, not an entirely inaccurate claim, but I'm getting a kind of twitchy feeling about our current stock market.
I'm afraid that your "twitchy feeling" is not good enough for matters of this importance. You need the best economic advice that money can buy.

For an even more accurate analysis, you need .......

THE MAGIC 8 BALL!!!​
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http://www.ask8ball.net/
 
Call me crazy, not an entirely inaccurate claim, but I'm getting a kind of twitchy feeling about our current stock market. A very similar feeling to what I had back in 2006 about property values. I just don't really see anything substantial happening with the companies who have stocks soaring day after day to justify the rise.

Is this all irrational investing? Is this a bubble about to pop?

Depends on what you mean by "bubble", "burst", "pop", "irrational", "substantial". and "twitchy". Will stocks ever go down again? Sure. But as to how much, for how long, and when, no-one seems to be able to say. If you call for a bubble bursting at some point in the future, eventually you're likely to be correct.

One of my favorite witticisms about this is to say that economists have predicted 10 out of the last 6 recessions. You gotta like those odds!
 
It's 2017. Has anyone figured out that it's the Federal Reserve that is causing the bubbles?
 
Call me crazy, not an entirely inaccurate claim, but I'm getting a kind of twitchy feeling about our current stock market. A very similar feeling to what I had back in 2006 about property values. I just don't really see anything substantial happening with the companies who have stocks soaring day after day to justify the rise.

Is this all irrational investing? Is this a bubble about to pop?

It is not a bubble... it is a house of cards.

The 2008 crash was not allowed to correct the market and clean out the speculators.

Banks were allowed to keep designating their junk as assets having a "market value". The central banks kept printing money. Interest rates are suppressed. The media spins the situation as "good" and "the new normal".

But wait a little longer... Just one unsettling major event!
 
Is this all irrational investing? Is this a bubble about to pop?


I have noticed an increased influx of spam mail asking me to please take a loan. The same thing happened in 2006 to 2008. There seems to be an awful lot of money lying around that can't be invested profitably.
I would say that the bubble is inflating rapidly, but I have no idea when it's going to pop.
 
So I take it you're in favor of abolishing the root cause of bubbles, the Federal Reserve, as opposed to blaming borrowers. Glad we got that sorted.

I have no opinion on that subject. My interest stops at the meaning of "cause." Specifically non-normative conversation about it.
 
I think the stock market might be in a sort of small bubble, but the real economy isn't going to be affected significantly when or if it "pops".

I do think students loans are like a bubble, but it's very difficult for me to imagine it ever "popping", or what form that would take, since the value of a degree is such an amorphous sort of thing.
 
The stock market is doing well but people really have no viable alternative to invest money when the banks pay .10% interest.

I believe a correction will happen also, but maybe not right away as businesses are doing well.

But without a crystal ball, nobody can say for sure when the "bubble" will burst.

The stock market, IMO is sort of like gambling at the moment.
 
Yes, we will have a full scale depression when the tax cuts take effect. This is because with the tax cuts, comes more deregulation. All the wealth is going to the top, from the bottom, which creates less money from consumers. The wealthy will continue to do well, though.
 
Yes, we will have a full scale depression when the tax cuts take effect. This is because with the tax cuts, comes more deregulation. All the wealth is going to the top, from the bottom, which creates less money from consumers. The wealthy will continue to do well, though.

Well, the tax cuts are going to extract wealth from seniors primarily, so it'll take the form of people eating more Ramen instead of more expensive grocery store items, people being unable to afford medications and maybe dying sooner* (a trend that's probably already started), weeks without electricity when people can't pay the light bill, and things of that nature. I'm not sure how much that suffering will bleed over into "the economy" (or the stock market) in the traditional sense, the way trillions of dollars in home values sort of evaporating overnight did a decade ago.

There's a chance overall "consumer demand" will stay about the same if the ultra rich start really taking advantage of those nifty tax breaks for more private jets or whatever, I think.

*come to think of it, what would be the economic effect of all the economically unproductive elderly just being neglected into death even more quickly, really? Like, what if we just went ahead and replaced SS and Medicare with buses to send them off into the Ozarks to forage for nuts and berries? I honestly don't know what Mr Market would think of that.
 
I have no opinion on that subject. My interest stops at the meaning of "cause." Specifically non-normative conversation about it.

What does that mean? You're not interested in conversation about the subject where the conversation doesn't conform to some "norm" that you haven't established? Well aren't you a special snowflake.
 
Is this all irrational investing? Is this a bubble about to pop?

No.

The market crashed in 2008. Investors felt uncertain about the economy
from 2009 to 2016. Essentially, no one invested in the stock market,
preferring bonds instead and overseas investments, leaving only stock
buybacks and dividend reinvestment as the drivers of growth.

Just after the start of November last year, in investors realized a positive
change in the economy and started putting money back into the market.
The sudden 25% rise over a year looks impressive but it will probably drop
back to 20% the next year, followed by a 16.67% gain, then a 14.28% gain,
and so on. Eventually, it will fall back to the market average for a century
of 5.5% per year.

So no bubble. Outflows from bond funds and overseas funds into the market
for the next eight years. In other words, just a rebalancing that no one will
find interesting.

P. S. BobTheCoward meet Tippit, Tippit meet BobTheCoward. :D
 
What does that mean? You're not interested in conversation about the subject where the conversation doesn't conform to some "norm" that you haven't established? Well aren't you a special snowflake.

Disinterest is the exact opposite of "snowflake."

Normative (as used in economics) and norm are not the same thing.
 
Disinterest is the exact opposite of "snowflake."

Normative (as used in economics) and norm are not the same thing.

You should be interested, since you posted on this thread which is about bubbles. You see, bubbles are defined by excesses in nominal prices, which are a function not only of the supply and demand of the asset or other bubbles in question, but of the supply and demand of the thing that they are denominated in - money!

Since the supply of and demand for assets is more or less stable compared to the supply of fiat money, which can be and is infinitely issued and reproduced by the Federal Reserve, it stands to (very simple) reason that it is the creation of excesses of money and credit which is the primary cause of price bubbles no matter what form they take, and since it is the Federal Reserve with the exclusive power to create money, it is the Federal Reserve which is the primary culprit.

If the supply of money were static, then any peak in one price must be offset by a trough in another price, or combination of prices, somewhere else. I defy you to identify an asset or group of assets which has declined sufficiently to provide a supply of money capable of creating asset bubbles elsewhere. Therefore, the only logical conclusion we can reach, is that the supply of money has increased dramatically, and once again, we know who the culprit is.
 
You should be interested, since you posted on this thread which is about bubbles. You see, bubbles are defined by excesses in nominal prices, which are a function not only of the supply and demand of the asset or other bubbles in question, but of the supply and demand of the thing that they are denominated in - money!

Since the supply of and demand for assets is more or less stable compared to the supply of fiat money, which can be and is infinitely issued and reproduced by the Federal Reserve, it stands to (very simple) reason that it is the creation of excesses of money and credit which is the primary cause of price bubbles no matter what form they take, and since it is the Federal Reserve with the exclusive power to create money, it is the Federal Reserve which is the primary culprit.

If the supply of money were static, then any peak in one price must be offset by a trough in another price, or combination of prices, somewhere else. I defy you to identify an asset or group of assets which has declined sufficiently to provide a supply of money capable of creating asset bubbles elsewhere. Therefore, the only logical conclusion we can reach, is that the supply of money has increased dramatically, and once again, we know who the culprit is.

Tl;dr
 
One of these posts is not like the others.


They are all the same. I'm only interested in the use of the term "make" as a matter of coercion and free will, cause and effect. It doesn't matter on what subject make is being used.
 
They are all the same. I'm only interested in the use of the term "make" as a matter of coercion and free will, cause and effect. It doesn't matter on what subject make is being used.
Your apparent disinterest only manifested itself when your comment about the Fed "making" people buy houses was shown to be silly and irrelevant.
 
Your apparent disinterest only manifested itself when your comment about the Fed "making" people buy houses was shown to be silly and irrelevant.

You would think if I had an interest in the federal reserve I would have made a comment on one of the 12th other posts in the thread. It's as if I only focused on the specific part that interested me and had nothing to do with the federal reserve.
 
You would think if I had an interest in the federal reserve I would have made a comment on one of the 12th other posts in the thread. It's as if I only focused on the specific part that interested me and had nothing to do with the federal reserve.
R-i-i-i-i-ght. A comment about the federal reserve has nothing to do with the federal reserve. Gotcha. :rolleyes:
 
R-i-i-i-i-ght. A comment about the federal reserve has nothing to do with the federal reserve. Gotcha. :rolleyes:

That is correct. This is another extension of my usual advocacy of personal autonomy. It wasn't even a comment about the federal reserve. It was about saying some group "makes" someone take an action. It doesn't really matter who the parties are.
 
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