James Mackintosh Wall Street Journal Stock Market Bubbles

One day the bust will be the big one, but for now the pullback in AI-related stocks has been almost completely offset by gains elsewhere

The S&P 500 is only 1.6% below its record, and the equal-weighted version—a measure of the average of all stocks in the index—hit a new high this past week.

The post-financial-crisis era of easy money has led to repeated booms and busts in small, and sometimes not-so-small, parts of the market in the past 15 years. 

Jag tycker det är skriande uppenbart att räntan världen över är för låg och att en större del av stimulanserna borde ske via finanspolitiken.

Rolf Englund blogg 5 december 2009

My best guess on the reason for all these bubbles is a mix of easy money, the gambling instinct and hopes for new technology. These are the standard ingredients of bubbles from canals and railroads to the Great British Bicycle Bubble. 

But they’ve been on steroids since the 2007-09 financial crisis.

Where the money comes from varies—in the 2010s it was from central banks, then from 2020 government spending added vastly more, while this year margin debt and leveraged ETFs have been significant.

“The banking system is in rude health,” says Russell Napier, a global macro strategist and keeper of the Library of Mistakes, an Edinburgh-based collection of books on financial history. “That means there’s always more credit to do the next bubble.”

Library of Mistakes

https://www.libraryofmistakes.com/

the increasing use of debt financing means that if AI more broadly turns out to be a bubble, it could hit the financial system.

James Mackintosh Wall Street Journal Aug. 1, 2026  

https://www.wsj.com/finance/stocks/stock-market-bubbles-recovery-029d21d0

In another uncomfortable parallel with ’08, they have been able to borrow very cheaply, in large part because the Federal Reserve intervened to keep rates low for a decade after the GFC and again after the pandemic. 

John Authers Bloomberg July 31, 2026  

https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2026/08/the-ai-craze-investors-look-more-at.html