Eric Falkenstein meinte am 19. Jul, 23:21:
'Right' price?
I think all the 2008 crisis showed is that
E[QtRt | Ωt+1] <> 0
which isn't really interesting. With hindsight, the US housing bubble should have been anticipated, but it was not obvious, and even Shiller was not predicting a housing crash, only that housing would probably not continue at its recent pace. As to the financial multiplier that really siezed up the financial community, this is still only beginning to be understood. Note that a recent journal on the crisis by esteemed academics presents several independent explanations, and of course there are several books noting hubris, greed, too much regulation, too little regulation, wrong regulation, the Fed, etc. So, I think this crisis doesn't say much about EMH, rather, it is very important for understanding financial multiplier effects, and bubbles.Alternatively, one could argue that the Ωt is not so simple, and that with hindsight it contained all we needed to know. That we did not interpret this correctly in real time, however, points to an error with certain properties, certain general regularities over time.
The bottom line is that I think the 'right' price means only a price that a reasonable mind finds appropriate, where reasonable does not involve hindsight. This does not preclude 'rational bubbles', because these are bubbles that are only identified ex post, and this bubble was definitely not identified by any large consensus of reasonable people ex ante (in contrast, the famous 3Com-Palm split was identified ex ante, with an article in the New York Times when it was still there and many people made millions on it).