This book is the outgrowth of a project at the New Jersey Institute Of Technology's School of Management funded by the Leir and Ridgefield Foundations that has evolved into the Leir Center For Financial Bubble Research dedicated to the study and understanding of Financial Bubbles. The Center's website is www.leirbubblecenter.org where working papers and other materials can be freely downloaded. The material and ideas for the chapters in this book were first presented at a Conference organized by the Leir Center at NJIT and supported by the Leir Retreat Center. However the ideas and concepts they contain have benefitted greatly from the comments and questions of the conference participants and their subsequent inputs and revisions. The first question posed was whether the participants could agree on a definition of a financial Bubble or how it might be modified for different types of Bubbles. From this evolved the question how one would know when one was in a bubble as opposed to looking back after a bubble had burst and stating "Oh yes! That was definitely a bubble." Robert Aliber who attended the Conference has defined a bubble as "a non-sustainable increase in the prices of certain currencies and classes of assets." In this way the journey to an increased understanding of financial bubbles has begun.
About the Author: Dr. Rapp is the first Henry J. Leir Professor of International Trade and Business at The New Jersey Institute of Technology's School of Management and Director of the Leir Center for Financial Bubble Research. He received his doctorate from Yale University in Economics as a National Science Foundation Fellow. His Masters degrees in Economics and Japanese Studies are from Yale and Stanford Universities, the later as a Ford Foundation Fellow. His Bachelor degree in Economics is from Amherst College, magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. He recently received a JD from Pace with Honors and a LLM in Tax from NYU. His teaching and research focuses on international business, strategy, and financial institutions, especially using technology to gain competitive advantage. His current research focuses on issues related to Financial Bubbles and how to create a sustainable advantage in a global environment. Before entering into fulltime teaching and research, Dr. Rapp was active in business and government as Executive Director for Bank of America's Corporate Finance Group in Tokyo responsible for North Asia, Vice President at Mitsui Nevitt Capital Corporation in charge of Mergers and Finance, and Commercial Counselor at the US Embassy in Tokyo. Prior to his leave with the Federal Government, he was group head Bank of America's Project Finance Section for Mining and Minerals worldwide and a Vice President with JP Morgan. Earlier in his career he was a consultant with the Boston Consulting Group in Boston and Tokyo, an adjunct professor at NYU and Fordham Universities, and an economist for AID in Korea and Vietnam. Elected a director of the Japan Fund in 1991, he continued in this capacity until 2005 and was a meof the executive, audit and valuation committees. He was a board member of the Association of Japanese Business Studies from 2003-2005. He has written more than 80 individual and joint publications on various aspects of trade, international business, and corporate strategy plus presented many papers, given congressional testimony and public speeches on these. Major fields of policy, economic and business research include product cycles, trade and investment strategies, industrial policy, international finance, bubbles, intellectual property, information technology, US-Japan competitive interaction, and Japanese economy and business.