First, in 1929, before the great October stock market crash, newspapers said prominently and repeatedly that traders were engaging in widespread speculative gambling. In an annual outlook piece on January 1, for example, The New York Times described “fantastic illusions” that were spurring “the most reckless stock market speculation.” The article said it was possible that, before long, “the bubble bursts.”

The notion that investors were laboring under “fantastic illusions” and had bid up prices to unsupportable levels appeared in many places. On the same day, The Atlanta Constitution ran a all-caps banner headline in its financial pages: “STOCK MARKET ACTIVITY AND PRICE FLUCTUATIONS SMASHED ALL RECORDS DURING YEAR JUST CLOSED.”

The Proquest newspaper database shows an increasing concern that excessive lending to support share purchases was fueling stock speculation, starting in 1927, and peaking in 1929. The database also shows a sudden increase in 1928, and again in 1929, of references to “tulipomania” — the bubble in tulip prices in Amsterdam that crashed in the 1630s. In 1928, the database shows, there was also a sudden burst in the use of the term “speculative orgy” in stock market articles.

Decades later, in the period leading to the dot-com crash that started in March 2000, we saw eerily similar themes in news articles. The term “tulipomania” began to spike again in the newspaper database, for example. And in a 1996 speech, Alan Greenspan raised the specter of “irrational exuberance,”, a term that went viral by 2000 (I made it the title of a book on the markets that I published that year). When dot-com stock prices started to decline in 2000, people were already primed to rethink their assumptions about the wisdom of holding shares in internet companies.

In early 2000, for example, there was a surge in stories of foolish investors buying anything with “.com” in the company name. Dot-com investments morphed into embarrassing “dot-bombs,” articles said, affecting the self-confidence of stock market investors and plausibly bleeding over to the whole market.

So where are we today?

Mass psychology appears to be in a different, calmer place. Investors do not seem to have the concern they had in 1929 or 2000 that other investors might suddenly sell their holdings and get out of the stock market.

That said, speculation based on excessive lending is a worry, the newspaper database indicates, but less so than in the previous periods. References to tulipomania have been appearing from time to time, but widespread fear that we might already be immersed in a speculative orgy is simply not evident. And while there have been articles this year about the boom in so-called FAANG stocks (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google), the database indicates that this issue is minimal compared with the attention given in the late 1990s to the dangers of dot.com stocks.