At Project Syndicate, Yale economist Robert Shiller takes a stab at predicting where the next bubble might be.  Shiller says there is no way to accurately predict bubbles--"bubbles are social epidemics, fostered by a sort of interpersonal contagion"--so he shares some "hunches."  

We have had a huge rebound from the bottom of the world’s stock markets in 2009. The S&P 500 is up 87% in real terms since March 9 of that year. But, while the history of stock-market prediction is littered with too much failure to try to decide whether the bounceback will continue much longer, it doesn’t look like a bubble, but more like the end of a depression scare. The rise in equity prices has not come with a contagious “new era” story, but rather a “sigh of relief” story.

Likewise, home prices have been booming over the past year or two in several places, notably China, Brazil, and Canada, and prices could still be driven up in many other places. But another housing bubble is not imminent in countries where one just burst. Conservative government policies will probably reduce subsidies to housing, and the current mood in these markets does not seem conducive to a bubble.

A continuation of today’s commodity-price boom seems more likely, for it has more of a “new era” story attached to it. Increasing worries about global warming, and its effects on food prices, or about the cold and snowy winter in the northern hemisphere and its effects on heating fuel prices, are contagious stories. They are even connected to the day’s top story, the revolutions in the Middle East, which, according to some accounts, were triggered by popular discontent over high food prices – and which could themselves trigger further increases in oil prices.

But my favorite dark-horse bubble candidate for the next decade or so is farmland – and not just because there have been stories in recent months of booming farmland prices in the US and the United Kingdom.

Read Bubble Spotting here.