AI

Cyclical Exuberance

In Irrational Exuberance, Nobel prize winner Robert Shiller chronicled how markets fall in love with their own stories. Prices climb not on fundamentals but on faith, the collective conviction that the future will be brighter simply because everyone believes it will be. For Shiller, this was not just a technical problem of valuation, it was a psychological drama in which optimism becomes a kind of mass hallucination.The late 1990s provided his perfect case study: the dot-com bubble. Companies with little more than a website and a slogan were valued in the billions. Venture capital poured into anything ending with “.com.”...