Many of his fellow billionaires are living in a bubble world, too.
Coming of age in a stagnant, post-bubble world of shrunken possibilities, they are angry, indulgent, individualistic--and perhaps Japan's best hope for developing a more dynamic and responsive society.
But innovation rarely happens in a bubble wrapped world where all risk has been carefully extracted.
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But after the 2000 burst of the dot-com bubble and the World Trade Center attacks of 2001, Sheppard found that people were less open to innovative, quirky ideas and more concerned about money.
And Taiwan introduced the world to Bubble Tea, a sweet milky beverage containing little pearls of tapioca.
It was as though my head was in a bubble, and the world and my film were far, far away in the background.
It was not surprising, then, that its exports should have fallen in the past year as the technology bubble burst and the world's biggest economies headed for recession.
The second and no doubt leading contributor to the gold bubble has been the world financial crisis of 2008-2009 and the subsequent worldwide central bank policy of monetary expansion to fight financial asset price deflation.
During his last years in power, Saddam was living in a bubble, a fake world sealed off from the real world by underlings too scared to tell him anything other than a pack of lies.
The Brussels bubble a cosy world of officials, EU-funded think-tankers and a good chunk of the press corps is not full of people who hate democracy.
If an economy has good reason to limit flows for example, to prevent a dangerous domestic bubble then the world is better off for the redirection of money.
During the Internet bubble Cisco was briefly the world's most valuable company, but now it and Microsoft together have a market cap about equal to that of Apple.
As with the run-up to those events (though on a larger scale), what we are witnessing now is simply the inflation of a world-wide bubble, which will sooner or later burst with agonizing consequences.
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In just a few chapters, he outlines the forces that brought the world to the brink of a bust: a house-price bubble boosted by runaway mortgage lending in the rich world, particularly America, a lightly regulated global financial system that found ever-more creative ways to speculate on rising house prices, and macroeconomic policymaking that was far too laid back about the dangers posed by asset-price bubbles.
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But, Greenspan asserts, much of the world experienced a housing bubble between 2001 and 2006 and, therefore, he and the Fed are largely blameless.
Anyone with any imagination has been expecting some sort of crashing in of the larger world into this little bubble of American bliss for years, if not decades.
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No model in the world can prevent a financial bubble if monetary policy is too lax, or a recession if it is too tight.
The White House and Treasury Department went along with the Fed's weak-dollar policy, which wrought havoc on the world by creating a commodity bubble and a catastrophic loosening of lending standards and investing prudence.
Nor does it correspond to the madness of the credit market bubble prior to 2007 when every fool in the world was buying mortgage backed securities without understanding the value of the real estate that backed them or the fantastically dangerous amount of leverage they were playing with.
And incidentally, that could have protected you from the great Japanese bubble because when Japan had its real estate and stock bubble, Japan got to be 50% of the world's capitalization.
Add in China and South Africa, and two-thirds (by economic weight) of the world that we track now has a potential housing bubble.
The bubble societies of Asia, and the failure of the Muslim world to achieve even middling levels of prosperity, show that economic development is unsustainable without a shift in people's mind-sets and in social structures.
Once the most valuable corporation in the world back in the late stages of the tech bubble in 2000, Cisco Systems (CSCO) remains a key supplier of telecommunications and networking equipment that grows with the usage of the Internet.
China will see a serious real estate bubble implosion which will cause huge turmoil in Asia and around the world.
That further pumped up the housing bubble, and exploded their pollution of U.S. and world financial markets to toxic levels.
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My forecast is that when the China bubble bursts it will be like a Tsunami through the global financial world.
The bears too have been surprised by the system's resilience, but they still see a large remaining financial bubble which they fear may burst, possibly plunging America and the world into a depression similar to that of the 1930s, or at least of the past decade in Japan.
Where Andy Warhol mused everyone will be famous for 15 minutes and that brave new world where animated TV family The Jetsons fly around in domed bubble cars to get from point A to point B.
Western commercial angels are soothing creatures: in a world of stress their wings are as soft as fresh towels or bubble bath, their expressions gentle, their activity nothing more strenuous than praying, singing, or lightly dancing.
However, as the U.S.-Soviet Cold War structure collapsed, and the world economy entered an unprecedented period of globalization, the 1980s Japanese economy bubble burst.
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