Everyone at the table is buying

At a family lunch in Cairo, every conversation drifts to the same subject. Flats in the new towns out in the desert, bought before they are built, to sell on before they are finished.

A cousin has two. An uncle is about to sign for a third. Nobody at the table plans to live in any of them. The figures are said with total confidence, and the confidence is the point. Inside this circle, buying is simply what sensible people do.

The one guest who has not bought is asked, kindly, what he is waiting for. He is meant to feel slow. That feeling is part of what keeps the whole thing moving, because every person who joins out of worry makes it look a little more normal to the next.

This is how any bubble behaves, whether it is a market, a fashion or a company that has stopped listening to anyone outside its own walls. From inside, everything is rational. The logic holds together. The people you trust agree with you. The only voices that disagree belong to people who obviously do not understand.

There is nothing wrong with joining in if you are certain it will hold. Some of these things hold for a long time.

But a bubble is held up by belief, not by use. Nobody at that lunch is asking who will finally live in all those flats.

When the belief runs out, the market will answer that question for them, and it will not care how sensible it all seemed at the table.