There is a famous story about Joe Kennedy, patriarch of the Kennedy clan. He was a Wall Street tycoon. On leaving his office in 1929 he overheard a shoeshine boy tell his customer that he’d just bought a share in the Hup Motor company. Kennedy turned around, reopened his office and sold everything he owned. He said later, “We all knew we were in a bubble. I realized that if the hype had gotten to the point where a shoeshine boy was playing in the market the bubble had burst.” Shortly after that the market cratered.
We are nowhere near the level of hysteria that I saw in the tech bubble and later in the real-estate bubble. Some things will, of course crater. Byte coin, for example. The market is not just one thing. It is thousands of things. Occasionally, from low Earth orbit, they appear to be going in the same direction. But that is rarely true. The market, like hemlines, will go up and down with no rhyme or reason.
Look instead to hiring. If companies are hiring, and I can see even locally that this is true, then things are fine.
Poor kid didn't pick a very good stock. Hupp was already in decline and would go out of business a decade later.
General:
I believe you have well spoken. I have heard before, “the economy is sound, the fundamentals are good”. We did not move into the shoeshine boy hysteria.
What is not considered by most angry people like Denn. is that the economy has been artificially penned up for nearly a decade. QE did raise the market but the growth was lackluster not based on much but moving fake money into the market. That dried up for nearly two years before the election when we saw our gains go to just about nothing. Before that much of the gain was just the very long recovery from 2008.
My concern about hiring is that there are not enough qualified youngsters to hire. Competition for these youngsters will cause wage inflation. Some of it because there has been so little wage growth for so many years.