PREFACEIs There A Bubble In Boom-Bust Books?
While I sincerely hope that Boombustology becomes a timeless classic for students, academics, policymakers, and investors alike, my current goal is considerably more modest. I have written this book because I believe it useful. The world is in the midst of an accelerating sequence of boom and bust cycles, and despite these developments, no organized, multidisciplinary framework exists for thinking about them. This book hopes to provide that framework. Lacking such a framework, we are destined to a world of massive unintended consequences and the continual escalation of extremes—the ultimate outcome of which may be quite destructive to society and the socioeconomic-political world as we know it.
Might it be possible that our attempts to deal with apparent Japanese economic dominance resulted in the Japanese bust, which drove the Asian financial crisis, which drove the dotcom bubble, which resulted in the U.S. housing boom and bust, which is currently creating unsustainable debt loads at the government level around the world? Might it have been possible to identify these booms before they busted to prevent the numerous unintended consequences that follow in the wake of our attempts to address each bust? This book will address these topics.
The market for books about financial booms and busts has itself boomed over the past several years, accelerated in no small part by the recent financial crisis. Why then does it make sense to add to ...