Monday, January 14, 2008
(11:42 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Predicting the Next Bubble
Many readers and writers of this blog share an addiction to reading about speculative finance and how it is destroying us all -- yet paradoxically, our only hope is another speculative bubble! Since we all know so much about this stuff, we should easily be able to predict the next bubble.When I opened up an article in the latest Harper's, I mentally predicted that "alternative energy" would provide the next bubble, and the author turned out to agree, though he also added the possibility that "public-private infrastructure partnership" would contribute. On IM just now, Brad predicted that coal could be the next big thing, and looking into the future, I thought that privatized water might be a good candidate for the bubble-after-next. (By the way, does anyone remember the big flurry of articles in the mid- to late-90's about the pending water crisis? That was when I first started following such matters -- Harper's and Atlantic Monthly both had front-page articles on the subject the same month. Harper's was much less sanguine.)
Any other suggestions?
