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It is not a bubble in that market caps are not "popping" - disappearing instantly, overnight, leaving shares worthless and dissolving fortunes. The current tech

It is not a bubble in that market caps are not "popping" - disappearing instantly, overnight, leaving shares worthless and dissolving fortunes. The current tech market is more like a punctured soccer ball, slowly leaking air. Regular people won't see this as a crash in their etrade portfolios; rather, they will notice a long, slow decline in the value of their pension/retirement funds.

abritinthebay 11y ago
So... what you're saying is that it's a standard part of the normal cycle where things grow for a while, plateau or shrink a bit, then grow again? i.e. Not A Bubble.
- roymurdock 11y ago
  Yeah, it's not a violent growth/crash cycle that people usually refer to as the outcome of a "bubble" (1929, 1987, 2001). I.E. the velocity is different. Right now it looks like a gentler reversion to the mean in GDP growth from the peak of this 6-year business cycle, which was much less pronounced than previous business cycle peaks. But who knows - the failure of a large firm that was generally thought to be solvent could set off another crash.
  - abritinthebay 11y ago
    It could, but if anything was going to do that then Yahoo would be the best candidate and I don't see panic over that situation.
rhino369 11y ago
Part of it is that regular people don't have a ton of exposure to this alleged bubbled. They don't have start up equity. Last time around the bubble caused the stock market as a whole to become overvalued. This time it's limited to mostly private companies. Someone invested in a mutual funds or index funds will have pretty little exposure. Sure Apple, Google, Twitter, and Facebook might lose some value, but those aren't a huge portion of a diversified portfolio. Even the first web bubble only had modest real impact on the general economy. It put the country into a shallow recession for a few quarters but that was it.

abritinthebay 11y ago

So... what you're saying is that it's a standard part of the normal cycle where things grow for a while, plateau or shrink a bit, then grow again? i.e. Not A Bubble.

roymurdock 11y ago
Yeah, it's not a violent growth/crash cycle that people usually refer to as the outcome of a "bubble" (1929, 1987, 2001). I.E. the velocity is different. Right now it looks like a gentler reversion to the mean in GDP growth from the peak of this 6-year business cycle, which was much less pronounced than previous business cycle peaks. But who knows - the failure of a large firm that was generally thought to be solvent could set off another crash.
- abritinthebay 11y ago
  It could, but if anything was going to do that then Yahoo would be the best candidate and I don't see panic over that situation.

rhino369 11y ago

Part of it is that regular people don't have a ton of exposure to this alleged bubbled. They don't have start up equity. Last time around the bubble caused the stock market as a whole to become overvalued. This time it's limited to mostly private companies. Someone invested in a mutual funds or index funds will have pretty little exposure. Sure Apple, Google, Twitter, and Facebook might lose some value, but those aren't a huge portion of a diversified portfolio. Even the first web bubble only had modest real impact on the general economy. It put the country into a shallow recession for a few quarters but that was it.