That number was, however, swollen by taxes on capital gains during the stock-market bubble.

The stock-market bubble began to deflate in 2000, leaving large institutions with much less income from their endowments than they had expected.

AT most companies, the rewards of the stock-market bubble flowed overwhelmingly to top executives.

According to Bernanke, all this foreign investment helped inflate and sustain the stock-market bubble of the late 1990's.

It's rather the fog of finance, particularly the long legacy of America's greatest stock-market bubble.

But what happened yesterday isn't, I think, quite the same as the crash of 1929 or the stock-market bubble of the late nineteen-nineties.

The era of the stock-market bubble has now well and truly ended.

Others speculate that after stock-market bubbles and the events of Sept. 11, 2001, consumers are desperately clinging to the past, often as they imagine it.

But no one knows whether the interest rate increase will help forestall a bursting of the stock-market bubble.

But in any reasonable accounting the biggest risk we face isn't inflation or a currency war or a stock-market bubble.