
Ask HN: What is the next bubble in your opinion? - ooonotooto
It&#x27;s been a while since financial systems in US and around the globe went through massive shock. We have massive supply of money and artificially boosted demand.<p>Murphy&#x27;s law says that, &quot;if everything seems to be going well, you have obviously overlooked something&quot;.<p>We had quite a dramatic elections in the US. Student debt is growing. Auto loans are growing. What concerns me more is that, there is significant wealth concentration under global organization such as Google, FB, Amazon, Pharma companies, Retail chains and more.<p>I am not american by birth, but I love to travel to rural areas and get to know people outside of tech. I can tell you that things don&#x27;t look great. Hundreds and thousands are leaving the jobs and switching to contracting, driving for Uber&#x2F;Lyft and&#x2F;or taking similar jobs.<p>Since we have computer literate people, founders, risk takers, entrepreneurs, intelligent people on this site, I want to know what do you think is going  to be next bubble?<p>Of course, in finance (federation) based economy, we all may feel financial shocks, but what could cause these massive shocks?
======
bdcravens
> We had quite a dramatic elections in the US.

> Since we have computer literate people, founders, risk takers,
> entrepreneurs, intelligent people on this site, I want to know what do you
> think is going to be next bubble?

I'd argue that "we" are pretty ignorant of what's really going on. (see the
recent presidential election)

We live in a world of fast Internet, current-gen personal devices, and
Instabizzes that make our life function. Our values (or what our Twitter feeds
has told us our values should be) are apparently the new world order.

There's a LOT of people, both red and blue, whose lives need more than an
emoji, hashtag, and a Ruby bootcamp to move the needle.

I think our bubble may be the one to pop.

~~~
_coldfire
>There's a LOT of people, both red and blue

There's a magnitude more of people who aren't either and wouldn't even
understand the meaning of that phrase.

~~~
bananicorn
Honestly, I didn't get it at first - I thought it was some kind of matrix
reference about the red and blue pill (in hindsight, not even for a particular
reason), not about democrats and republicans... Even though I'm not american I
feel stupid not having thought of that first.

------
0xcde4c3db
It might not be the _next_ bubble (rather next decade's bubble), and not as
big as the mortgage securities bubble, but I have my eye on siloed social
media in general and Facebook in particular.

I don't know exactly how or when the federated/web-of-trust alternative to
Facebook will unfold, but people are definitely working on commoditizing this
stuff, and doing so in an unassuming way that has the potential to catch major
players by surprise when it finally crystallizes. I'm not convinced that any
of XMPP, GNU Social/OStatus, diaspora*, or IRCv3 have all the pieces to solve
the puzzle, but the direction they're pulling is not a big mystery, and I
consider it a very real possibility that a successor to those efforts does to
Facebook what HTML5 did to Flash.

~~~
spronkey
I'd be pretty happy if this were the case. Likewise, I'd be pretty happy if
the same thing happened to instant messaging.

------
vadym909
The student loan bubble will burst putting colleges out of business or cutting
back hard- and as before the public will bear the brunt. from 3 years ago and
it is still growing with no slow down [http://ijr.com/2014/06/149516-mark-
cuban-predicts-burst-stud...](http://ijr.com/2014/06/149516-mark-cuban-
predicts-burst-student-loan-bubble/)

~~~
JamesBarney
Could you explain this a little. I don't understand.

Usually a bubble is an asset where most of it's value is tied to future
expected appreciation. And when price growth starts to fall this decreases
future price, and then it crashes down to its fundamental value(or a little
below).

I'm not quite sure how this can happen with student loans. Is the discounted
future cash flow of student loans widely different from their price?

------
jdavis703
I think there's a lot of bad auto loans out there. I just bought a new
vehicle, and when applying for the loan I couldn't fill out half of the
required information (I didn't have it readily at hand). The business office
person just kept saying "that's OK, just skip that part." All in all they had
barely enough information to let me prove I was who said I was, much less that
I could repay the loan. This behavior reminded me a lot of what I heard up the
mortgage bubble, where there was basically free money floating around.

~~~
nicholas73
It's personally weird to me that auto loans can be a serious bubble, since I
would not feel comfortable buying a car unless I have 10x the sticker price in
spare cash, or free cash flow that covers it. Seriously, since it's just a
depreciating asset with maintenance liabilities.

~~~
bdcravens
I'm sure you know you are the exception. About 85% of all new vehicles are
purchased on credit; the US is approaching $1T in auto loan debt.

~~~
stephancoral
1.1 trillion, a number that actually surprised me. According to this article,
auto loans are "the second-fastest growing consumer debt market"
[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/allan-smith/the-us-auto-
loan-d...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/allan-smith/the-us-auto-loan-debt-
mar_b_11911206.html)

------
joeclark77
I suspect it will be non-healthcare jobs in healthcare. People are noticing
that at the same time their premiums are doubling, tripling, quadrupling,
doctors and hospitals seem to have larger and larger staffs of computer
technicians, billing specialists, insurance negotiators or whatever the heck
those people are doing. It used to be that a doctor could be self-employed,
with just one nurse who doubled as a receptionist. Now fewer people are going
into medicine, at the same time millions of people are going to be trained to
work in the healthcare industry.

I think a lot of the resentment against "Obamacare" is that people can see
this non-value-added waste ( _muda_ ) and they saw government making a deal
with the insurance industry to add even more bureaucracy to an already
wasteful system. If there is going to be any compromise betwen left and right
on healthcare, it may be that we keep the mandate (pleasing the left) but cut
the regulation and bureaucracy that creates all the waste (pleasing the
right).

That would be good for doctors and patients, of course, but very bad for
insurance companies and other parts of the healthcare-industrial complex.

------
CM30
I think advertising may be the next bubble. I mean, there have been lots of
comments online about how large a percentage of ad clicks are fraud, so it's
likely most sites shouldn't be making anywhere near as much cash from their
ads once that's figured out.

Add the increasing usage of adblockers, fears of privacy regarding tracking
and ads plus a stupidly high amount of competition, and I can see ads not
being able to fund the sites they need to soon. Complete with various news
sites, social networks and platforms simply being unable to pay their bills
without finding a new payment model.

------
SFJulie
Actual university education. When public it transforms in debt (Europa) else
private in student loans (USA).

The debt of the countries are growing up.

The quality of research papers is a measure of quality of the teaching that is
decreasing, since both reproducibility and relevance diminishes (Signal =
ln(relevant / noise)).

The over qualification has not resulted in improvement of lower paid works or
the raise of wages and it has put kids in situation of disarray whereas they
would have survived otherwise hence the word "pro-net-arians". This generation
that cannot save money is a generation barred from entrepreneurship, favouring
conservative business models.

We are also seeing the first wave of homeless educated and competent coders.
Education is also failing at protecting the educated one.

Education has also failed at achieving a fairer society and have resulted in
the opposite leading worldwide to a ghettoisation of poor (public) vs rich
(private that is often publicly funded).

[https://www.google.com/finance?cid=662984](https://www.google.com/finance?cid=662984)

The danger of education is that it is essentially present in public debts that
by nature is hard to bankrupt; thus countries (like Europe) may bankrupt as a
result of this bubble. Remember that right now debt are obligations that are
the safest investment ... if obligations disappear, the market will be
explosively volatile.

------
dontJudge
College bubble will pop. Prices have been sustained longer than normal due to
special laws for school debt. But even with the extra protection of wage
garnishments and no bankruptcy option, it cannot keep going up. People are
starting to get their money underground in a homeless lifestyle or leave the
country. It's going to burst and hard.

------
tbihl
The bond market. We're all doing some crazy things with our government
spending, at local and national levels, and it has to fall apart at some
point.

------
bsvalley
There won't be any big bubbles anytime soon. Only small bubbles. If silicon
valley falls apart tomorrow for example, it would be considered a small bubble
since it would be very contained (only VC money). In 2000 the entire world was
injecting money in Silicon Valley. It was a complete different setup...

So talking about the next big bubble in 2017 does not make sense.

~~~
segmondy
Do you know where some VC's money comes from? Wall street invests in VCs using
pension funds, 401k money. So if SV falls apart, the effect will be more than
outside SV. Follow the money.

~~~
bsvalley
You need to understand the difference between "VC" money and the economy. The
first one is about extra cash that can be invested, the economy is about
people's money. If a bank loses it's money invested in tech, it won't go
bankrupt because the bank doesn't invest its capital into one single thing.
It's more complex than you think.

------
drsilaswiggin
The Euro will collapse

------
tmaly
I am placing my bet on either the student loans, state pension systems, or the
auto loans.

------
spoonie
The carbon bubble in the form of the market cap of carbon-extraction
industries. Though it is possible there are non-burning uses for petroleum
that will sustain the industry in the medium-term future.

------
zhte415
There has been a recession +/\- 2 years from the end of every decade for the
past 170 years.

Boom and bust. Past pains fade and we get over-confident about our ability to
act prudently.

------
mmargerum
The last one for a while. The money bubble.

------
miguelrochefort
> Hundreds and thousands are leaving the jobs and switching to contracting,
> driving for Uber/Lyft and/or taking similar jobs.

Which is a very good thing...

------
auternach
The question isn't: "What is the next bubble?" The question is: "Which of the
existing bubbles will collapse first and cause the rest of them to implode?"
Furthermore, the even bigger question is: "Is there creeping contagion forming
behind the scenes in derivatives and shadow banking similar to 2007, out of
sight of governments and regulators yet again?"

The central banks of the world have gone on a ridiculous 8 year binge to prop
up global growth, this binge will have consequences. Probably for Donald
Trump, who may buy another two years of bubble activity with his planned
economic actions.

Most people are used to the 1999 bubble and the 2007 bubble. Those are just
the ones that got really out of control Over the last decade, numerous smaller
bubbles have come and gone, mostly deflated by government (foreign or
otherwise) intervention and we are generally none the wiser. China has had
bubbles in their real estate and stock market come and go (or be suppressed,
for now) several times in the last couple years.

If you have seen what China is willing to do to their skies in terms of
pollution, imagine what they are willing to do behind closed doors in their
financial and real estate sectors. One can only imagine the toxic, over-
leveraged stew that is likely lurking behind the scenes. People have been
expecting China to implode for years, it hasn't happened.

In the United States there are multiple bubbles now. Students loans are
clearly in a bubble. It was announced this week that the government admitted
to falsifying data (they call it a "technical glitch," It is not a glitch, it
was likely deliberate) around what % of sub-prime students were not repaying
their debts.

The private tech stock bubble of worthless, unprofitable Silicon Valley
unicorns who can never go public is alarming but seems contained for now and
not of a large enough size to tank the stock market.

Sub-Prime Automotive is also a bubble, but so far the numbers are far lower
than anything near what was experienced in 2007.

Real estate in the United States in some segments, notably high-end real
estate in Miami and Manhattan were both in bubbles as well and seem to have
deflated. There was also a significant housing bubble in Vancouver which seems
to be deflating due to government action.

So there are numerous bubbles that we know about. But this isn't the real
problem. The real problem is that credit, derivatives and shadow banking going
on behind the scenes. While many regulations have been passed to ensure that
the United States banking sector is more "solid," the financiers of the world
always find a way to introduce more leverage.

My conclusion after digging into the various bubbles and their sizes is as
follows:

Sub-Prime Automotive is a bubble but the size of it isn't so bad. The biggest
problem is repercussions of such a bubble collapsing and becoming contagious.

Real Estate seems ok, nowhere near what happened in 2007 in terms of scale and
corruption.

Student loans are a rather large bubble. Still nowhere near the size of the
sub-prime mortgage nightmare.

Tech bubble, shouldn't be a big problem if it implodes by itself in the United
States

China: I can't even speculate. Everyone has been screaming wolf about China
for years and nothing has collapsed yet. China is rated #1 by the Economist as
a risk of collapse which would take down the global economy.

I am going with: China or EuroZone banking melt-down that spreads and pops all
the United States bubbles.

------
hnhnic
Mary Jane.

