Echo Bubble

It's a missed opportunity that no techno band ever called itself "Echo Bubble." There's still time...

Think about an echo. You're standing at the mouth of a cave and you yell out your name. You hear the name repeated back at you, quieter and quieter until, eventually, it's silent again.

Okay, now think about a bubble. Not the soapy floating thing that kids love. The financial kind. The kind where suddenly tulips are selling for house-sized prices and the whole trading community has lost its collective mind.

Now put the concepts together.

You have a financial bubble. That bubble bursts. But some people still hold tragic hope that it was all a dream-turned-nightmare. So as prices fall, suckers move in to "catch the falling knife." Wall Street phrase, common in bubble-burstings. Prices go up again for a while. A new bubble-ette forms. Not as big as the first one, but a smaller, quieter version. An echo...an echo bubble.

Of course, it's still a bubble, so it's bound to burst. But again, as they say, "falling can feel like flying...for a while."

Related or Semi-related Video

Finance: What is a Bubble?5 Views

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Finance allah shmoop what is ah bubble All right well

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this is a bubble See what happened there got bigger

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and bigger and bigger And then it popped and here's

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the stock market from about nineteen Ninety two until about

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two thousand It got bigger and bigger and bigger And

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then it popped And yet was a bubble not just

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a big fat bull market It was a crazy ludicrous

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tulip mania Kind of time like start ups with almost

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no revenues trading and billions of dollars Yep And tulip

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mania That was a really thing One tulip sold for

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forty grand go figure wasn't like if you ate it

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you lived forever So yeah it was a bubble So

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what caused the ninety nine bubble Well greed and it

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wasn't good At least for some The internet had come

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along It was a new thing consumers by the millions

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could download in the privacy of their homes Art films

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Yeah That's what we'll call them art films by the

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terabyte money was flowing from silicon valley investors into startups

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at record pace hoping to take advantage of this new

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amazing internet thing and the valuations of companies got higher

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And higher and higher Nasdaq went up some four hundred

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percent in just half a dozen years and the blessed

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cos traded at one hundred times trailing revenue not earnings

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but revenue So if you think about the idea that

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if you invest a dollar and you want to get

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more than that back and that dollar comes from profits

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of companies than one hundred times revenues cos we're probably

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something like five hundred times earnings or more So for

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one hundred dollars oven investment you've got like a dollar

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of revenues in twenty cents of potential earnings Like maybe

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a a decade later maybe yeah that's a bubble and

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it burst At least you don't have that danger with

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actual tulips or bitcoins Yeah they take bitcoins when you

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buy tulips Would be kind of a good marriage there

Find other enlightening terms in Shmoop Finance Genius Bar(f)