One common factor with the dotcom and then the housing bubble was the democratization of access to previously restricted forms of economic behavior. They both liberalized of credit and investing. Day trading and online brokers that emerged with the dotcom bubble helped fuel the investment that drove it. Subprime lending and the mad financial engineering that supported it made a home mortgage available to almost anyone. Both innovations facilitated a lot of shadiness.
The other morning I caught a segment on CNBC talking about some financial company that wanted to make startups more accessible to ordinary investors. That's already a reality to some extent, at the grassroots level, with kickstarter. These seem like the sort of innovations that would again liberate a lot investment and speculation.
They're sort of unrelated to the Groupon and Facebook IPOs -- those IPOs don't have anything to do with them. And yet at the same time they are trends that draw momentum from the buzz surrounding Groupon and Facebook.
I keep looking for the next bubble, more as a casual student of human nature than any sort of financial whiz. McIPOs for the masses seems like it could deliver on that promise.
The other morning I caught a segment on CNBC talking about some financial company that wanted to make startups more accessible to ordinary investors. That's already a reality to some extent, at the grassroots level, with kickstarter. These seem like the sort of innovations that would again liberate a lot investment and speculation.
They're sort of unrelated to the Groupon and Facebook IPOs -- those IPOs don't have anything to do with them. And yet at the same time they are trends that draw momentum from the buzz surrounding Groupon and Facebook.
I keep looking for the next bubble, more as a casual student of human nature than any sort of financial whiz. McIPOs for the masses seems like it could deliver on that promise.
But I agree that we aren't necessarily there yet.