Good luck on seeing the next bubble coming. Every time one appears everyone (not really EVERY one, just most) claim this one is different from all the others. That is until the new bubble bursts.

Actually I will credit Greenspan with pointing out the “irrational exuberance” of the tech bubble. Too bad we did not have someone pointing out the irrationality of the real estate bubble before the bubble grew so large that when it burst the sound was deafening. Of course there was more to the deflation of the real estate bubble then though wasn’t there?

Only a moran would think that.

I don’t claim i saw this coming, but after looking back, it seems pretty clear. Everything that has happened is your classic bubble and it corrisponds with flagrent growth of the money supply and credit creation. There were some people who called this, but the fact that we had a bubble shows that most people didn’t. I work in an economics field and even within this world, most economists that don’t specialize in housing and/ or monetary theory really werent even paying much attention to this in the first place. Plus every time there is a bubble, just like in the late 90′s with the “new economy” everyone always thinks something has changed to fundimentally make things different then in the past. I myself am pretty young and have only observed this last one business cycle as an adult. Moving forward I am going to be paying much closer attention to bubble behavior of any kind.

My point is that it seems too many voices are being raised to point out how they saw the problems we now experience in advance. If that were true, each of these voices, if they were so certain what was going to happen, would be rich beyond our wildest imaginations because of the crystal ball they had available to allow them to peer into the future.

I’m not quite sure what your point is. Anyone who thinks that an economy at any given point is controlled by one given factor is an idiot. The tax cuts were helpful and likely lessened the period of the 2001 recession, but are not a magical cure all. Not discovering this site until last, year, yeah “my voice” wasn’t literally “here,” but I have always critiqued the extreme supply-sider claims that are bastardized from the actual academic theory.

The growth we did have in the 2000′s was largely due to a fed induced bubble. But then gain the growth we had in the late 90′s was also a bubble and unsustainable and partially caused by lose money as well. M2 was growing at double digit rates for years in the late 90’s. The problem was instead of allowing a moderate recession in 2001 where the excesses of the tech bubble could be liquidated allowing for new growth afterwards though better allocation of real resources, the Fed loosened monetary policy too sharply, and just shifted one bubble into another. We are now paying greatly in this recession because we essentially have 20 years of a bubble economy, driven by increasingly lower and lower interest rates, to adjust for. We have come to the end of the raod.

I suppose this was the intention of my initial post on this thread. Voters are completely oblivious to what the fed does and instead we point at presidents, when we should be looking at the fed chairman instead.

Hindsight sure is great isn’t it?

Back during the Dubyah administration, when Greenspan insisted on the loosening of credit, where was your voice? (My own voice was absent.)

Seems to me that what economic stimulus we got back during the Dubyah days is more explained by the real estate bubble caused by Greenspan then can be explained by Dubyah’s tax cuts.

But most bubbles have had a key ingredient… loose and easily obtainable credit (even when we had a gold standard). I’m not advocating a return to the gold standard. I’m making the point that the federal reserve and its loose monetary policy following the 2001 recession was one of the key ingredients to creating the housing bubble. There’s a reason why people like Friedman, who did NOT advocate a commodity based currency, also advocated the end of trying to manipulate short term interest rates by the Fed. Dick Armey had a piece in the WSJ recently blaming the fed for much of the bubble as well.

Imagine what Rush would have had to say if Representative Conyers or somebody like that told such a joke.

But I forget. Rush holds himself to a different standard then he would hold the rest of us. Like what did he say should happen to drug abusers prior to he himself being caught abusing drugs?

kirwin, as usual you’re …

Unclench and smile once in a while, or else you’ll start liking Ron Paul.

Amit, I’ve long noticed how other people are better at articulating your views than you are. Thanks for pointing it out.

EJ, bubbles have repeatedly occurred in economies whether a currency was commodity-based or not.