Just out of curiosity, what was the time lag between when the bonds were issued for the railroads and the crash?

The railroad building mania was mostly after the Civil War. (It would have been earlier, except, oops, you know, bullets and stuff.) So it began around 1865, and the crash began in 1873 with a panic. It was so prolonged it was called “The Great Depression” until the 1929 fiasco took the mantle, and is now called “The Long Depression” because the after effects lasted almost 20 years.

So, a maximum of 8 years, depending on when the bonds were issued. Not a very long standing bubble, but them most of them aren’t.

(As a point of information, the canal building bubble in the US began following the completion of the Erie Canal with its wonderous benefits (there was a canal bubble in Britain something like 30 or 40 years earlier, which also ended disastrously). The US canal bubble lasted only about a decade as well, ending with the Panic of 1837.)

And of course the dot-com bubble lasted around 6 (7?) years, from 1994-2000 or so.

And, to fill another line or two, the housing market peaked in 2006 but the bubble didn’t explode until 2008. It’s a guess as to when the “housing bubble” began, I’d say 2002 or 2003, but more softly and slowly than these bubbles we’re talking about.

Seems like the mark is between 5-10 years. How long has the AI bubble been going on? Well, ChatGPT started in 2022, but googly googol tells me the AI bubble didn’t really begin until 2025, so Rip Van Bubble has a while before he wakes up.