We’ve been doing a lot of research on bubbles lately.
People talk a lot about the financial bubbles, the one’s that manifest in particular asset prices, or individual securities.
Then there’s your thematic/macro bubbles, the bubbles that follow technological innovations. The bubbles of the canal, the railroad, the telephone, the internet, and the handheld.
Each technological bubble, backed by the full faith and credit of the financial markets those very technologies have enabled. The bubbles of the company, the bond, the stock, the derivative, and the fund.
Step back and bit, and you start to see the bubbles that work on systems, the one’s that manifest in the push and pull of different models of civilization. The kind that inevitably resolve themselves in war, of one form of other...
The war/s of the central planner vs the wisdom of the crowd (starting in the Cold War and ….)
The wars of the nation vs the other (initiated by Napoleon and Bismark, and terminated by Mussolini, Hirohito and you know who)
The wars of the king vs the republic (with two false starts in Alexander, and Caesar, both trying to take democracy east, both falling prey to the egoism of empire).
And it reverberates down, each conflict of a kind, each essentially a conflict over and about culture. Each of these conflicts, a kind of bubble about culture. Each of these conflicts about the two-thousand year trend of the individual consistently taking more and more liberty out the hands of the state.
And if we’re being honest, we don’t know if this is a bubble.
Mostly because that chart doesn’t look that much different if you sub in a blue line of US money supply.
Maybe your answer to whether that’s a bubble or not just boils down to where you fall on the spectrum, the one that weighs the interests of the individual vs the interest in the community.
And maybe we’re wrong, not only about how the direction it plays out, but the why.
I guess we’ll see.
Log Scale