The New York Review of Books: The Story of a Bubble

The New York Review of Books: The Story of a Bubble "The fabulous Nineties—with soaring stock market, falling unemployment, declining defense spending, budget surpluses, and bubbly optimism—are history. Moreover, as long as market participants remember how they lost $6 trillion on absurd and wildly overvalued speculations, a similar exuberance is unlikely to recur in the near future. More likely is an economy in which large federal budget deficits lead to cuts in existing civilian programs and doom critical priorities such as comprehensive health care. The long-term management of our economy has fallen prey to the short-term maximization of votes in which the planning cycle of the US administration extends no further than November 2004. For all these consequences, surely, the faults lie in misguided policies of the Bush administration and not in the stars."