There is a historical pattern of overinvestment in a first bubble leading up to a crash, followed by a second wave which exploits the now-cheap capital assets a

There is a historical pattern of overinvestment in a first bubble leading up to a crash, followed by a second wave which exploits the now-cheap capital assets and actually does fairly well. You can see this in railroads, real estate, telecommunications infrastructure at various points from telegraph to telephones to fiber, and arguably financial capital markets themselves when new investment vehicles open up. The point of this is that second-wave investments often look a lot like the first, but with much higher-quality real capital associated with them (eg, gold mines that actually produce at least some gold, vs. the gold-exploration firms of the first wave). Combine it with basically zero-opportunity-cost money dumped into the financial sector by the fed and it's a recipe for perhaps-inflated valuations, but mostly in the context of investments in actual assets. You might see very low returns for an indeterminate time, but large negative returns are something else. TLDR: There's a difference between banks buying and selling fundamentally profitable financial investments to each other at inflated nominal values, and sinking large amounts of money into unprofitable real assets.