What about the possibility of cutting off the bubbles before they become dangerously large? It has often been proposed that the Fed should limit asset-price inflation in much the same way that it is committed to limiting goods-price inflation. In that view, the Fed should have choked off both the dot-com and house-price bubbles before they became large enough to do much damage. The usual counter-argument is that it is difficult to distinguish an asset bubble from a rise in price that is justified by “fundamentals.”