Not really; there isn't the irrational exuberance that the dot com, housing, or bitcoin bubbles had. There aren't stories about people getting rich quick, new normals, etc.
> ...deficits over the last 20 years.
You're onto something here. There's definitely been an increase in government spending. The other thing going on is that there was a lot of quantitative easing following 2000 and 2008. There's another word for everything going up: inflation. Maybe that's what we're seeing, but government inflation metrics are missing it for some reason.
I would counter that by saying that throwing money at companies that literally say they may never be profitable (Lyft, Uber), and valuing them at insanely high amounts is pretty irrational.
Granted, they could still be profitable and overvalued.
Perhaps the government spending is the irrational exuberance this time.
The problem is that more and more people are dependent on gov transfers for part (or whole) of their income.
( https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=q5u )
Whereas growth benefits mostly the wealthy. ( https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=q5v )
And gov spending is less and less "productive", education spending is not increasing, whereas spending in simply population sustainment does.
They're missing it because they're designed to miss it. If inflation was still calculated like it was in 1980 it'd be around 10%.
The changes in CPI calculation (continuous consumer basket adjustment, etc.) are well documented, well known in econometrics, and is considered a sane thing. (After all you can't really equivocate a TV from the 50s and a TV now.)
And while it's always possible to make better adjustments, shadowstats does not argue for this, it just argues against a strawman conspiracy.
https://moneymaven.io/economonitor/emerging-markets/deconstr...
"For example, a can of tomato sauce that cost $.25 at Piggly Wiggly in 1982 cost $.79 at my local market in early 2015. Starting from the 1982 price, the CPI predicts that it should cost $.61 in 2015 while ShadowStats predicts that it should cost $2.64. Starting from the 2015 price and working backwards, the CPI predicts that it should have cost $.32 in 1982 while ShadowStats predicts that is should have cost $.08. Based on these calculations, we see that the CPI underestimates inflation, as measured by the Tomato Sauce Index: The ratio of the 2015 predicted price of $.61 to the 2015 actual price, $.79, is .77, an underestimate of 23 percent. The ratio of the ShadowStats prediction to the actual price is 3.32, an overstatement of 223 percent. For tuna, both indexes overestimate inflation, the CPI by 34 percent and ShadowStats by 478 percent, and so on."
also: http://blog.jparsons.net/2011/03/shadow-stats-debunked-part-...
And to address the "they miss it part". Well, probably most people don't buy stocks, and most people don't buy private equity limited partnership chunks, so ... CPI-U does not measure "asset bubbles".
The problems we are seeing are very much socially driven (emptying of middle income jobs -> lower pressure in low income jobs -> increasing poverty -> no money for education and healthcare spending -> low income stressed disabled people turn to high-risk high-yield activities drugs & crime). Coupled with the current populist politics, it's no wonder the "economic outlook" is a bit gloomy.
Could you explain a bit what do you mean by this?
Check this out, 5th chart down on all the coutnries and their debts: https://democracyjournal.org/magazine/42/the-private-debt-cr...
It might not be so bad if it was just the US. But, most of all the major countries in the world all have a similar problem with deficits: France, England, Japan, and even China. All of their debts (public + private) are about 200% of GDP and over. But, what's most striking is the difference between 1980 and today. That massive increase shows that the level of spending we're accustomed to is not sustainable.