> bubbles are notoriously unpredictable and generally don't happen when they are loudly and widely proclaimed to happen any minute now.
Is that true? It seemed to me that the most common opinion before the recent Chinese real estate crash was that it was a bubble; architect friends of mine who worked in China said the government had no doubt prices were unreasonably high; the thing they remained hopeful about is whether a soft landing was possible. Similarly it seems like it was by no means an uncommon opinion in the Japanese asset bubble, NFTs, beanie babies, and even the dotcom boom that this is (to use Greenspan’s phrase leading up to the dotcom bubble) “irrational exuberance”.
Is that true? It seemed to me that the most common opinion before the recent Chinese real estate crash was that it was a bubble; architect friends of mine who worked in China said the government had no doubt prices were unreasonably high; the thing they remained hopeful about is whether a soft landing was possible. Similarly it seems like it was by no means an uncommon opinion in the Japanese asset bubble, NFTs, beanie babies, and even the dotcom boom that this is (to use Greenspan’s phrase leading up to the dotcom bubble) “irrational exuberance”.