But stocks can rise indefinitely.
Consider this:Evidence from many quarters suggests that human wellbeing does not rise indefinitely alongside gains in material wealth.
This level of debt cannot be sustained indefinitely; under current policies, debt is projected to rise indefinitely and without limit as a share of the economy.
Home prices roughly doubled between 2000 and 2006, according to the Case-Shiller index, and many homeowners talked themselves into believing they would continue rising indefinitely.
The United States had its Internet and telecommunications bubble in the late 1990's, when stock prices looked as if they could rise indefinitely and unemployment kept hitting new lows.
It is a tax imposed by the market and will continue rising indefinitely as more and more people want more and more stuff.
Of course, there were also speculative, highly leveraged deals at the height of the economic bubble, when rents and property values looked as if they would rise indefinitely.
But a small group of Goldman traders realized sooner than most others on Wall Street that the industry had gone overboard wagering that real estate prices would rise indefinitely.
Much like the home buyers who believed, in 2007, that house prices would continue to rise indefinitely, the private-equity firms assumed that the price of electricity, Energy Future's main product, would keep increasing.
This certainly helps to explain why house prices in big cities have tended to outpace those in rural areas, but it is not a reason to expect prices to keep rising indefinitely.
