With a fresh Afterword on the existing state from the stock market, the ongoing debate over the “new economy,” and the bigger implications of “irrational exuberance.”

With this controversial, hard-hitting account of today’s explosive marketplace, Robert J. Shiller, a leading expert on marketplace volatility, evokes Alan Greenspan’s infamous 1996 research, “irrational exuberance,” to explain the alternately soaring and declining stock market. Shiller’s unconventional yet persuasive debate credits an unprecedented confluence of events with driving shares to uncharted heights, and he analyzes the structural, ethnic, and psychological causes of these degrees of growth not reflected in any additional sector from the economy. Now more relevant than ever before, this analysis is both chilling and convincing-a must-read for the individual investor, the policy maker, and the investment professional.