Anatomy of a Stock Market Bubble

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• Working Paper No.987 22 March 2021

  The Souk Al-Manakh

  Frank Veneroso and Mark Pasquali
  Abstract

  It is widely agreed that the Nasdaq during the dot-com era 20 years ago was a full-fledged stock market bubble. Recently, the US stock market according to many metrics has become significantly more speculative and overvalued than it was at the dot-com peak 20 years ago. In both instances, a very broad subset of stocks became so highly valued that speculation in them had to be untethered from all fundamentals: the essence of what we call a “pure price-chasing bubble.”
   
  This paper, drawn from a book in progress, examines the history of stock markets for comparable pure price-chasing bubbles, finding nine or so which have ever reached such a speculative extreme, with an over-the-counter market in Kuwait in the early 1980s called the “Souk al-Manakh” representing the most extreme example. Based on personal exposure to this Souk al-Manakh almost 40 years ago, we describe this anatomy and thereby make transparent the recurrent dynamics—on the way up and on the way down—of these greatest asset bubbles in human history. When one applies this framework to the current US stock market, one sees that the stock market in the US today will likely follow the disastrous path of the dot-com market.

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• Working Paper No.1021 29 June 2023

  Can It Be Prevented This Time?

  Giuseppe Mastromatteo and Lorenzo Esposito
  Abstract

  Since the nineties, crises have punctuated financial markets, shattering the conventional wisdom about how these markets work and how to regulate them, and forcing a deep rethinking of the supervisory framework that, however, did not change much of the banks’ behavior and incentives. In particular, banking regulation did not face the nexus profitability-riskiness. Based on Minsky’s financial instability hypothesis, we discuss the literature on banks’ profitability and its relation to the originate-to-distribute model. We also propose a different strategy for banking regulation, based on a profitability cap that prevents financial innovation from overwhelming supervision. Finally, we discuss the data for the US case, confirming the importance of profitability as a signal of incoming troubles and the possibility of using the profitability cap to greatly simplify banking regulation.

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• Working Paper No.986 10 March 2021

  Keynes’s Theories of the Business Cycle

  Pablo Gabriel Bortz
  Abstract

  This paper traces the evolution of John Maynard Keynes’s theory of the business cycle from his early writings in 1913 to his policy prescriptions for the control of fluctuations in the early 1940s. The paper identifies six different “theories” of business fluctuations. With different theoretical frameworks in a 30-year span, the driver of fluctuations—namely cyclical changes in expectations about future returns—remained substantially the same. The banking system also played a pivotal role throughout the different versions, by financing and influencing the behavior of return expectations. There are four major changes in the evolution of Keynes’s business cycle theories: a) the saving–investment framework to understand changes in economic fluctuations; b) the capabilities of the banking system to moderate the business cycle; c) the effectiveness of monetary policy to fine tune the business cycle through the control of the short-term interest rate or credit conditions; and d) the role of a comprehensive fiscal policy and investment policy to attenuate fluctuations. Finally, some conclusions are drawn about the present relevance of the policy mix Keynes promoted for ensuring macroeconomic stability.

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