I was still a kid then but in 1998/1999 was there active talk of a bubbles like there is now?
I feel like we have had varying levels of bubble phobia for at least a year now. It's starting to feel like it would be more surprising if there wasn't a bubble then if there was.
And isn't the whole point of a bubble that people are bidding something up unaware that it's value is fictitious? Which seems difficult if everyones constantly talking about a bubble, no?
"I was still a kid then but in 1998/1999 was there active talk of a bubbles like there is now?"
Yes, and the prevailing counterargument at the time was, "But this time it's different! The fundamentals of everything have changed, because...internet!"
If you look at historical bubbles, and particularly at historical technology bubbles -- the South Sea Bubble, the Mississippi Bubble, the 1920s Bubble, the bubbles of the mid to late 1800s -- "This time it's different!" has been a pretty consistent pattern of denial. Typically there's a rational basis for the exuberance at first, but this onto this basis is piled a whole lot of speculative investment and fervor, wildly inflating valuations beyond the boundaries of plausible expected return.
Some of that mass irrationality has to do with easy access to capital, and some of it has to do with easy openings to capital markets. The latter is usually required to really kick a bubble into high gear. [So the operative question in this case is: what effect will the opening of private startups to public investment have?]
Are we currently in a bubble? Really, really hard to say. I don't feel qualified to make that judgment. But to answer your question, yes, most bubbles have at least a few naysayers who are bearish on the situation. But their voices tend to get drowned out, especially by those with interests in keeping the bubble going.
Nit: "Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau." Profesor Irving Fisher of Yale, autumn, 1929, 3 days before the great crash.
Quoted on page 70 of J.K. Gailbraith's The Great Crash 1929 which I very strongly recommend to anyone.
was there active talk of a bubbles like there is now
Yes. Most surreal immediately prior to the crash. NASDAQ peaked in March of 2000, many start-ups continued, though increasingly desperate for funding (which generally never came) through early 2001, by which time many finally gave up the ghost.
I remember distinctly looking around especially at the younger workers (often just out of college, early 20s, now in their mid to late 30s) wondering what they'd do when the music stopped. For most it was back to mom & dad.
In 1999, I think there was a lot more effort going into the stories explaining "Why This Time Is Different."
There were a few cautionary stories back then, but most of the tech press and most of the mainstream press was full of hype. There was a cottage industry back then creating stories explaining how the Internet was going to let the economy grow and grow and make us all rich. I still see those stories, but it seems like many more people want to be The Guy Who Spotted the Bubble rather than the Pied Piper
There was a lot of talk about why things were different because we had entered a "new economic era". Some attributed this to the Internet. Others to Alan Greenspan.
I feel like we have had varying levels of bubble phobia for at least a year now. It's starting to feel like it would be more surprising if there wasn't a bubble then if there was.
And isn't the whole point of a bubble that people are bidding something up unaware that it's value is fictitious? Which seems difficult if everyones constantly talking about a bubble, no?