Economic Bubble Quotes

Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.

Irrational exuberance

In every stockjobbing swindle every one knows that some time or other the crash must come, but every one hopes that it may fall on the head of his neighbor, after he himself has caught the shower of gold and placed it in safety.

I don't think objectively we are in a tech bubble when tech stocks are at a 30 year low.

Economists are very good at saying that something cannot go on forever, but not so good at saying when it will stop.

A growing nation is the greatest ponzi game ever contrived.

You cannot fuel demand, or consumption-led demand, on credit forever.

The rage for railroads is so great that many will be laid in parts where they will not pay.

At the center of every recession is a serious imbalance in the economy and mirrored in the financial system. Think subprime mortgage and the Great Recession, or the technology bubble and the early 2000s recession. There are no such imbalances today.

Iceland is a rich country, but in the early 21st century, this prosperity got to our heads, and in 2008, it collapsed.

I'm very conscious and weary of the hype economy and the way people build things up just to tear them down.

… they made the cardinal error of extrapolation. Forecasters assumed that recent trends would continue indefinitely and that hot economies would stay hot…. Euphoria overcame sound judgment, a process that has doomed economic forecasting for as long as experts have been doing it.

During the Boom Years, it was so easy to lose sight of basic values. For example, there was lots of nonsense said and written about the so-called "New Economy." Some people said all economic laws have been overturned! Then all the problems developed. Corporations were heavily fined for illegalities. Many of their senior-level executives were indicted, convicted, and sent to prison.

Dubai was a property bubble. Plain and simple. Go to Dubai and see what happened. It was... what I call it the 'Edifice complex' - it's just, we can grow by putting up lots and lots of buildings and trying to attract people to come here, stay here, and put up offices here and sooner or later, you put up too many.

When interest rates are low we have conditions for asset bubbles to develop, and they are developing at the moment. The ultimate asset bubble is gold.

All the risky things that were happening back in ’06 and ‘07 are back again to the same level, if not more. So we are in the beginning of a credit bubble, but just the beginning.

The economy is a ponzi scheme. People are working harder than they ever have for less wages, but we have so many bobbles because manufacturing has come up so quickly over the past hundred years that people have the illusion of wealth.

Education is a bubble in a classic sense. To call something a bubble, it must be overpriced, and there must be an intense belief in it.

The Internet bubble circa 2000 is the most extreme in modern capitalism. In the 1930s, we had the worst depression in 600 years. Today is almost as extreme in the opposite way.

Yellen’s comments suggest, and I agree, that we are in an asset bubble.

We are in a big, fat, ugly bubble. And we better be awfully careful.

Presidential money is almost like the housing bubble. It's growing at such an astronomical rate, you think it can't get any bigger.

I think we have a bubble in the US in government bonds, because of the quantitative easing and the negative real interest rates, and to some extent, that increases asset values across the board, including in startups.

Yet another hedge fund manager explained Icelandic banking to me this way: you have a dog, and I have a cat. We agree that each is worth a billion dollars. You sell me the dog for a billion, and I sell you the cat for a billion. Now we are no longer pet owners but Icelandic banks, with a billion dollars in new assets.

We spend too much, we borrow too much, and we distort the markets. The bigger the distortions have lasted, the bigger the bust will be.