Concetto di bolla speculativa

A spike in asset values within a particular industry, commodity, or asset class. A

speculative bubble is usually caused by exaggerated expectations of future
growth, price appreciation, or other events that could cause an increase in asset
values. This drives trading volumes higher, and as more investors rally around the
heightened expectation, buyers outnumber sellers, pushing prices beyond what an
objective analysis of intrinsic value would suggest.
The bubble is not completed until prices fall back down to normalized levels; this
usually involves a period of steep decline in price during which most investors
panic and sell out of their investments.
May also be referred to as a "price bubble" or "market bubble".
Speculative bubbles have a long history in world markets; the progression of time
along with economic advances has not slowed their arrival. In our modern financial
markets, speculators can often make profitable bets when speculative bubbles burst
by purchasing derivatives or shorting securities directly.

While each speculative bubble has its own driving factors and variables, most involve
a combination of fundamental and psychological forces. In the beginning, attractive
fundamentals may drive prices higher, but over time behavioral finance theories
suggest that people invest so as to not "miss the boat" on high returns gained by
others. When the artificially high prices inevitably fall, most short-term investors are
shaken out of the market after which the market can return to being driven by
fundamental metrics.
Introduzione
The current nancial crisis caused by the burst of the U.S. housing bubble is
not new. History has too often
witnessed the rise and collapse of nationwide asset bubbles. Each time, an
entire economy cheered for a
bubbles birth and then mourned its death. The rst recorded nationwide
bubble is the "Tulip mania" a
period in Dutch history during which contract prices for tulip bulbs reached
extraordinarily high levels and
then suddenly collapsed. At the peak of the tulip mania in February 1637,
tulip contracts sold for more than
10 times the annual income of a skilled craftsman, which is above the value
of a furnished luxury house in

seventeenth-century Amsterdam.1 Figure 1 shows the tulip price index

during the 1636-37 period.2