Irrational Exuberance - Softcover

Shiller, Robert J.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0767923634 ISBN 13: 9780767923637

Publisher: Crown Business, 2006

Synopsis

As Robert Shiller’s new 2009 preface to his prescient classic on behavioral economics and market volatility asserts, the irrational exuberance of the stock and housing markets “has been ended by an economic crisis of a magnitude not seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s.” As we all, ordinary Americans and professional investors alike, crawl from the wreckage of our heedless bubble economy, the shrewd insights and sober warnings, and hard facts that Shiller marshals in this book are more invaluable than ever.

The original and bestselling 2000 edition of Irrational Exuberance evoked Alan Greenspan’s infamous 1996 use of that phrase to explain the alternately soaring and declining stock market. It predicted the collapse of the tech stock bubble through an analysis of the structural, cultural, and psychological factors behind levels of price growth not reflected in any other sector of the economy. In the second edition (2005), Shiller folded real estate into his analysis of market volatility, marshalling evidence that housing prices were dangerously inflated as well, a bubble that could soon burst, leading to a “string of bankruptcies” and a “worldwide recession.” That indeed came to pass, with consequences that the 2009 preface to this edition deals with.

Irrational Exuberance is more than ever a cogent, chilling, and astonishingly far-seeing analytical work that no one with any money in any market anywhere can afford not to read–and heed.

About this title

About the Author:

Robert J. Shiller is the Stanley B. Resor Professor of Economics at Yale University. He is the recipient of the 2000 Commonfund Prize, awarded for Best Contribution to Endowment Management Research, for Irrational Exuberance. He is also the author of Market Volatility and Macro Markets, which won the 1996 Paul A. Samuelson Award.

Review:

“Robert Shiller has done more than any other economist of his generation to document the less rational aspects of financial markets.” — Paul Krugman

“A modern classic of ‘serious’ economics that demands to be read, and can be enjoyed, by the interested nonspecialist.” –The Economist

“A dose of realism that serious investors will ignore at their peril.” —The Wall Street Journal

“The point of Irrational Exuberance is not to help investors dump their houses before the current exuberance fades. It is to deepen our understanding of the events we are watching as one bubble gives birth to another.” —The International Herald Tribune

“Irrational Exuberance [is] a dazzling, richly textured, provocative book . . . offering a cogent statement of the bears’ view of events to come. Shiller is not merely a bear—he is a grizzly.” —BusinessWeek

About this edition

• Publisher: Crown Business
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0767923634
• ISBN 13: 9780767923637
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 336