Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Irrational exuberance
Summary
"Irrational exuberance" is the phrase used by the then-Federal Reserve Board chairman, Alan Greenspan, in a speech given at the American Enterprise Institute during the dot-com bubble of the 1990s. The phrase was interpreted as a warning that the stock market might be overvalued.
Greenspan's comment was made during a televised speech on December 5, 1996 (emphasis added in excerpt):
The Tokyo market was open during the speech and immediately moved down sharply after this comment, closing off 3%. Markets around the world followed.
Greenspan wrote in his 2008 book that the phrase occurred to him in the bathtub while he was writing a speech.
The irony of the phrase and its aftermath lies in Greenspan's widely held reputation as the most artful practitioner of Fedspeak, often known as Greenspeak, in the modern televised era. The speech coincided with the rise of dedicated financial TV channels around the world that would broadcast his comments live, such as CNBC. Greenspan's idea was to obfuscate his true opinion in long complex sentences with obscure words so as to intentionally mute any strong market response.
The phrase was also used by Yale professor Robert J. Shiller, who was reportedly Greenspan's source for the phrase. Shiller used it as the title of his book, Irrational Exuberance, first published in 2000, where Shiller states:
Irrational exuberance is the psychological basis of a speculative bubble. I define a speculative bubble as a situation in which news of price increases spurs investor enthusiasm, which spreads by psychological contagion from person to person, in the process amplifying stories that might justify the price increases, and bringing in a larger and larger class of investors who, despite doubts about the real value of an investment, are drawn to it partly by envy of others' successes and partly through a gamblers' excitement.
Shiller is associated with the CAPE ratio and the Case–Shiller Home Price Index popularized during the housing bubble of 2004–2007.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.