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Originally Posted by Robbie
But they weren't "printing money" (that didn't happen until the end of 2008 with Bush's bailout, and now Obama's bailout). And of COURSE "bubbles" are a roaring economy.
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No. Bubbles are bubbles. A roaring economy is sustained economic growth.
There was definitely a tech bubble, but the computer and internet industries were real growth aside from the bubble. The computer/tech industry is now responsible for millions of jobs, some of the most successful companies on the planet and a tremendous leap forward by society. The fact that asshats ran up the stock market by day trading and momentum trading stocks of those companies (and companies that should never have been bet on) does not change the fact that it has been an enormous area of growth for decades.
Now take a look at the housing bubble. It was not growth of anything. Nobody innovated a new way to have people afford homes. It was a gigantic ponzi scheme where companies packaged worthless paper and resold it to others eager to run up the fictional price of home loans that had no actual value. Decades from now, there won't be mortgage companies and a housing sector created that employs millions of new people and spurs innovation the way computers did. There will only be massive amounts of debt and millions of people who were busted out by the scheme. We don't need a student loan bubble... we need a sustainable and significant area of growth that creates a new sector of employment, real investment and innovation. Something on the scale of 'computers' or 'electricity' or 'iron' which will likely have an investor bubble of some sort along with it but will also produce real economic growth.
Hydrogen power would help, very cheap power from pebble bed reactors would help, a better understanding of quantum locking or quantum teleportation or quantum computing would help, a full understanding of mass from the LHC and Higgs Boson research would help. Those are the kinds of things that lead to a 'roaring economy' and they require real research. We are funding a Mars rover and we finally managed to complete the genome of our closest evolutionary ancestors recently, but we ought to be funding a lot more than that. If you have the time to read a book... read
http://www.amazon.com/Regenesis-Synt.../dp/0465021751 - the things they are doing with genetics in terms of everything from data storage to organisms that produce desirable resources is truly mind-blowing. Those sorts of things may be home runs eventually.
What sucks is it's the bottom of the 9th, with 2 outs and nobody on base... and we are losing by two runs. We don't just need a home run, we need a few home runs to climb out of all this.