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Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

I lived through 2001. This is not a bubble. As exhibit one I point out that everyone has been calling bubble since 2012. Real bubbles have more rah rah and less skepticism and more crazy.

I do see a slowdown but this is nothing like dot.com. Seems like a normal correction and is not really separate from the rest of the economy being uncertain. Nothing tech specific.

Bubble is an overused term. An inflated market is not a bubble, and a correction is not a bubble bursting. Markets go up and down all the time.

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It is not a bubble in that market caps are not "popping" - disappearing instantly, overnight, leaving shares worthless and dissolving fortunes. The current tech market is more like a punctured soccer ball, slowly leaking air. Regular people won't see this as a crash in their etrade portfolios; rather, they will notice a long, slow decline in the value of their pension/retirement funds.

Part of it is that regular people don't have a ton of exposure to this alleged bubbled. They don't have start up equity. Last time around the bubble caused the stock market as a whole to become overvalued. This time it's limited to mostly private companies.

Someone invested in a mutual funds or index funds will have pretty little exposure. Sure Apple, Google, Twitter, and Facebook might lose some value, but those aren't a huge portion of a diversified portfolio.

Even the first web bubble only had modest real impact on the general economy. It put the country into a shallow recession for a few quarters but that was it.

So... what you're saying is that it's a standard part of the normal cycle where things grow for a while, plateau or shrink a bit, then grow again?

i.e. Not A Bubble.

Yeah, it's not a violent growth/crash cycle that people usually refer to as the outcome of a "bubble" (1929, 1987, 2001). I.E. the velocity is different.

Right now it looks like a gentler reversion to the mean in GDP growth from the peak of this 6-year business cycle, which was much less pronounced than previous business cycle peaks.

But who knows - the failure of a large firm that was generally thought to be solvent could set off another crash.

It could, but if anything was going to do that then Yahoo would be the best candidate and I don't see panic over that situation.

Same here. I'd have friends in the investment industry ask me about some new IPO or another. "I can't tell you what these guys do." Still, they'd pour money into them.

Even worse was pouring money into things like Nortel after the crash was well under way. People just chased it to the bottom.

Edit: I thought I'd add that even in a bloodbath like 2001, not everything tanked. The (tiny) company I was with continued to grow in revenue. We weren't doing anything glamourous, just focusing on business value. No IPOs, although some folks were trying to push us that way in the late 90's.

Compared to 2001 this is a correction not a bubble. I also survived that and not only did you lose money it took 10 years to pay off the bad tax debt from failing to sell it was like a double whammy, lose your money while also gaining a huge stock options tax bill.

Not all bubbles are the same. Credit is free and money is inefficiently allocated. Just because we are not seeing price inflation, that does not mean that all is well. The global economy has been unravelling for the past year as central banks push assets into equities which would not "deserve" the investment without a manipulated yield curve.

An inflated market can be called a bubble, it just depends on how inflated it is and how people interpret that. Just because something is a bubble doesn't mean it's destined to burst. What we're seeing now could be considered a cool-down that would prevent a burst. There's nothing overly negative calling something a bubble when it does appear to be a bubble.

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