Irrational Exuberance 3rd Edition

When Alan Greenspan, then Chair of the Federal Reserve Board, used the term irrational exuberance to describe the behavior of stock market investors, the world fixated on those words. He spoke at a black-tie dinner in Washington, D.C., on December 5, 1996, and the televised speech was followed the world over. As soon as he uttered these words, stock markets dropped precipitously. In Japan, the Nikkei index dropped 3.2%; in Hong Kong, the Hang Seng dropped 2.9%; and in Germany, the DAX dropped 4%. In London, the FTSE 100 was down 4% at one point during the day, and in the United States, the next morning, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 2.3% near the beginning of trading. The sharp reaction of the markets all over the world to those two words in the middle of a staid and unremarkable speech seemed absurd. This event made for an amusing story about the craziness of markets, a story that was told for a time around the world.

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Why do people still refer so much to irrational exuberance years later? I believe that the words have become a useful name for the kind of social phenomenon that perceptive people saw with their own eyes happening in the 1990s, and that in fact, it appears, has happened again and again in history, when markets have been bid up to unusually high and unsustainable levels under the influence of market psychology.

Many perceptive people were remarking, as the great surge in the stock market of the 1990s continued, that there was something palpably irrational in the air, and yet the nature of the irrationality was subtle. There was not the kind of investor euphoria or madness described by some storytellers, who chronicled earlier speculative excesses like the stock market boom of the 1920s. Perhaps those storytellers were embellishing the story. Irrational exuberance is not that crazy. The once-popular terms speculative mania or speculative orgy seemed too strong to describe what we were going through in the 1990s. It was more like the kind of bad judgment we all remember having made at some point in our lives when our enthusiasm got the best of us. Irrational exuberance seems a very descriptive term for what happens in markets when they get out of line.

Irrational exuberance is the psychological basis of a speculative bubble. I define a speculative bubble as a situation in which news of price increases spurs investor enthusiasm, which spreads by psychological contagion from person to person, and, in the process, amplifies stories that might justify the price increase and brings in a larger and larger class of investors, who, despite doubts about the real value of the investment, are drawn to it partly through envy of others' successes and partly through a gambler's excitement. We will explore the various elements of this definition of a bubble throughout this book.

Irrational Exuberance is a book by American economist Robert J. Shiller of Yale University, published March 2000.[1] The book examines economic bubbles in the 1990s and early 2000s, and is named after Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan's famed 1996 comment about "irrational exuberance" warning of such a possible bubble.

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