The exact term George Soros uses is “superbubble,” as he tells a skeptical Greg Ip of the Wall Street Journal in an interview, Soros, the Man Who Cries Wolf, Now Is Warning of a “Superbubble”.
Bubblicious is a kind of gum favored by callow teenagers (I loved it when I was a callow teenager), and Soros occasionally seems callow in this interview, most amusingly when Soros and Ip get into a serious discussion of whether the trader is successful because of his “reflexivity” theory or his aching back.
Ip gets him to confess that
I have a record of crying wolf at these times. I did it first in “The Alchemy of Finance” [in 1987], then in “The Crisis of Global Capitalism” [in 1998] and now in this book. So it’s three books predicting disaster. [After] the boy cried wolf three times … the wolf really came. If we can sail through this without a recession, then the superbubble story is seriously impacted…
Even Soros in his role as Cassandra (the ancient Greek twist on the boy who cried wolf) does not see a reprise of the Great Depression:
I can envisage a very broad range of scenarios. One would be a very prolonged world-wide recession. I cannot imagine a replay of the ’30s. But you can have a muddle-through replay of the Japanese scenario, 10 years of stagnation.
All in all, it makes for a good counter to the interview published in the New York Review of Books, which I noted in George Soros Puts the Bite on Markets.
(Hacked Soros image courtesy, Moonbattery. Used by permission.)
