John Cassidy: I guess most people would define a bubble as an extended period during which asset prices depart quite significantly from economic fundamentals.
Eugene Fama: 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.
Ok, I bet Fama, $1, that the third spike is a recognizable bubble.
If I were a famous stock market theorist, I would add the cost of restructuring to my model so we can all understand why we are hesitant to adjust prices.
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