The first bubble I ever saw was the dot-com bubble of 1999. I was born in the early seventies, and I made it to my mid-twenties before ever hearing about an asset price bubble. Commercial real estate went nuts in the eighties, but nobody ever called it a bubble. They didn’t even call it a crash when it crashed.
Bubbles aren’t new—they’ve been around since Dutch tulips—but it’s only recently that they’ve worked their way into the average investor’s lexicon. If you asked the man on the street, he would probably tell you there are five different bubbles going on right now. There is some truth to that, but also some untruth to that.
The true part is that a lot of things are currently overvalued. I would say stocks are overvalued. Most people would agree. I would also say bonds are overvalued. Some people would agree. I would say corporate credit is overvalued, real estate in certain parts of the country is overvalued, and maybe a few other things.
But these are not bubbles.
So, what is the difference between something being overvalued and something being in a bubble?
Since you asked…
A bubble is a psychological phenomenon that occurs when an asset class becomes overvalued and is accompanied by an obsession or preoccupation with that asset class. For example, you probably heard that the Dow just hit 20,000. It is not a bubble. Nobody is obsessed or preoccupied with the stock market. You don’t have Coast Guard guys day-trading it like when I was still in the service in 1999. That was a bubble. In fact, nobody really gives a crap about today’s stock market. Usually, they have CNBC on in the locker room at my gym. Nobody pays any attention to it.
By that standard, there are very few bubbles in the world right now. But there is a bull market in people running around calling everything a bubble. Please ignore those people. The only real, honest-to-goodness asset price bubbles out there are in residential real estate in Canada, Australia, and Sweden. They are going to end up in the landfill in New Mexico with all the Atari E.T. cartridges.
