Call me a pessimist, but I doubt this time, the bubble will have a happy ending.

"We have done what no other economy has done before, faced with an asset bubble," Lawrence Lindsey, a former Fed governor and Bush adviser, said at a recent panel discussion. Praising both the Fed's rate cuts and Mr. Bush's tax cuts, he said, "This is the first time in history the textbook economic policy... was used, and worked. The problem is, once you finish that chapter of the economic texts, you turn the page and the page is blank -- because no one has gone through the process before."

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Mr. Volcker thinks a crisis is likely. Investor confidence could fade "at some point," he said, with "damaging volatility in both exchange markets and interest rates."

His successor is more sanguine. Capitalist economies, Mr. Greenspan believes, always have imbalances but are also continuously reallocating resources and capital to correct them. Thus, imbalances seldom become crises. "The number of forecasts of crises...is far in excess of the number of crises that actually occur," Mr. Greenspan told a recent audience in Chicago. "There is something equivalent to an invisible hand which continuously is readdressing market imbalances to reach equilibrium."