Costs of ignoring bubbles
Advocates of preventing stock market bubbles point out that bubbles can distort economic and financial decisions, creating costly imbalances that can take years to dissipate. During the late 1990s, surging market values for technology-related companies led many firms to vastly overspend on computers, networking equipment, and software, at the expense of other items. It is now clear that a portion of that technology capital was never put into productive service. This wasteful spending was nevertheless counted in real output statistics, thus contributing to overestimates of the economy’s trend growth rate. The overhang of the excess capital acquired during the bubble has contributed to low levels of capacity utilization and a sluggish rebound in business investment relative to the average recovery (see Lansing 2003).