
stocks, gold, silver, Japanese stocks, and biotech companies. In retrospect, every-
one would agree that the prices paid for such assets at market peaks were very
“high.” Still, confidence in the conventional reasonableness of stock market val-
uations would cause some to dispute the notion that such high prices were crazy.
Among those who view the market as perfectly efficient, stock prices are never
“too high” or “too low,” they are always “just right.”
V. THE LATE-1990s INTERNET STOCK MANIA
To cite a recent, and therefore sure to be controversial, example of bubble-like
behavior in the stock market, consider the late-1990s pricing of Internet stocks. ...