Buying rapidly appreciating stocks or real estate seemed, for a time, a better deal than making productive investments in industry or agriculture. Ironically, the f aster foreign inv vestment flowed in, the more investments were sucked away from industry and agriculture and production stagnated or declined in both. Foreign financial obligations thus rose, while the capacity to repay those obligations fell. Once the speculators realized this was not sustainable, the meltdown began. Capitalism can thus create an illusion of prosperity, even as it sets the stage for economic collapse.
Bubbles are everywhere.
And it is in the nature of bubbles to pop because trading away life for money is not, in the long run, sustainable. Here's hoping we learn this lesson more gently than Asian economies have, but learn it we will. Squandering real wealth in the pursuit of numbers is ignorance of the worst kind. The potentially fatal kind.