I have been side-following these economic things since that "crash of '87" (including reading Ravi Batra's book back then). My mom was a big fan of Louis Rukeyser's PBS shows (including "Wall Street Week" ) and I ended up watching that and just monitoring the whole thing.
I am naturally a risk-averse pessimist, which even gets reflected with my posts on DU. However I also look for "patterns" and there is something very different about what has been done over the past 3 years versus what was done in the past. And part of that is because this situation had a cause that hadn't been seen in over a century (1917 - 1918), where you had a "pandemic" (Spanish Flu back then, COVID now), a war (WWI back then, Russia's invasion of Ukraine), and environmental calamities (massive cold waves that impacted agriculture back then and the extremes of climate change now with floods, wildfires, hurricanes, tornadoes/destructive windstorms, etc).
This current economic environment is not a "bubble", although "bubbles" have formed within it.
It was a "perfect storm" that needed a unique way to handle it, and as I noted in another post, there are things that were done like the passage of 3, job-stimulating funding laws (Bipartisan Infrastructure law, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the CHIPS & Science Act) that are helping to keep a "stimulus" to many parts of the economy, going.
We also have a law (that has been weakened over the years but it still in place) - the 2010 "Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act", done to address "The Great Recession" ), that also created an agency - CFPB (Consumer Financial Protection Bureau) - that is still here too.
So there are guardrails and circuit breakers that are in place NOW that didn't exist in the past, including during those times with "bubbles". We watched a mini-meltdown happen with crypto bro Sam Bankman-Fried, that took out a couple regional banks but was halted thanks to some of regs put in place.
It's just like how it was realized during the 1987 crash, that "programmed trading" could kill your market, so things were done to halt trading if the moves were over a certain threshold.
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