Irrational Exuberance (book) Irrational Exuberance (book) Irrational Exuberance is a March 2000 book written by American economist Robert J. Shiller, a Yale University professor and 2013 Nobel Prize winner. The book examines economic bubbles in the 1990s and early 2000s, and is named after Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan's famed "irrational exuberance" quote warning of such a possible bubble in 1996. Published at the height of the dot-com boom, the text put forth several arguments demonstrating how the stock markets were overvalued at the time. The stock market collapse of 2000 happened the exact month of the book's publication. The second edition of
Irrational exuberance Irrational exuberance "Irrational exuberance" is a phrase used by the then-Federal Reserve Board chairman, Alan Greenspan, in a speech given at the American Enterprise Institute during the dot-com bubble of the 1990s. The phrase was interpreted as a warning that the market might be overvalued. Greenspan's comment was made during a televised speech on December 5, 1996 (emphasis added in excerpt): The Tokyo market was open during the speech and immediately moved down sharply after this comment, closing off 3%. Markets around the world followed. The prescience of the short comment within a rather dry and complex speech would not