Last year made bears, emerging market investors, value investors and precious metals investors feel fools. The market went up continually, rising by over 30%, while stock values became ever more extended and precious metals prices headed steadily downhill in spite of an unparalleled orgy of money printing by the world’s central banks. This year, market tendencies have almost completely reversed this pattern. Is it, can it be, the return of some sort of economic rationality?

There is beginning to be some support for this idea. Bill Gross, chairman of the gigantic bond fund group Pimco, declared on Tuesday that “the age of getting rich quick is over.” He then recommended investment in 5 year Treasuries, which given their pathetic pre-tax yield of around 1.5%, well below even the officially massaged estimate of inflation, will in general make you poor slowly – or rather more quickly if, as one might expect, inflation picks up.

“Get rich quick” has been the central investment strategy in the years of loose monetary policy since 1995. The dot-com boom focused on the most asset-light and fastest moving parts of the tech sector, then the housing bubble focused on massive leverage and “flipping” houses to turn a long-term asset into a speculative trading vehicle. Since 2009, money has headed into whichever sector seemed to be heading for the skies most quickly, armed with as much leverage as could be obtained from the banking system.

Entities such as mortgage REITs are built entirely on leverage, using long-term mortgage investments financed in the short-term “repurchase” market and raising ever larger injections of new capital from a booming stock market to reap outsize returns from short-term rates held artificially low and a “gap” between short-term and long-term rates held artificially large.

Above all, there has been the explosive growth of hedge funds, with outstanding assets totaling $2.63 trillion in December 2013 in spite of those entities’ outsize fees and persistent underperformance of the markets. Private equity funds, which totaled $3.5 trillion in assets at the end of 2013, represent another twist on the twin current investment themes of ultra-cheap leverage and short-term investment (albeit slightly longer than the trigger-finger investing of the day traders) – as well as the perennial theme of ultra-high management fees that leave very little juice for the actual investor when long-term returns are calculated.

One form of getting rich quick, high-frequency trading may already be in retreat. Profits on HFT are estimated tom have been around $5 billion in 2009, but have shrunk since to around $1 billion in 2013 as volume increases have begun to reverse while margins have been decimated with the entry of new players into the game. Italy, not usually a financial innovator, in September 2013 introduced a “Tobin” transactions tax on HFT; its example is likely to be followed by others, as the tax is found to be a “nice little earner” for state Treasuries, helping to pay for the armies of financial regulation bureaucrats they are now deploying. Tobin taxes kill HFT; its demise will not be much mourned.

“The age of getting rich quick is over” means much more than a modest dip in the stock market, it means that all the other ways of getting rich quick by raising vast amounts of money and deploying it in speculation must be at an end. It must have become impossible to raise hedge fund money without a long and impeccable track record. It must have become impossible to raise private equity money without a strong portfolio of companies that have been turned around. Further it must have become impossible to raise speculative second, third and fourth rounds of venture capital without a solid product and a path to substantial profitability.

We’re clearly not at that point yet. While speculators can raise vast amounts of money and charge massive fees thereon, it is still possible to “get rich quick” if perhaps not quite as rich and quite as quick as a couple of years ago.

Nevertheless, if the era of “get rich quick” has not yet ended, it is nearing its denouement. The Fed is at each meeting tapering its bond purchases by a further $10 billion monthly, down to $65 billion in February. A Federal budget deficit of $514 billion, as the Congressional Budget Office currently expects for the year to next September 30, represents a monthly issuance of $42.83 billion. On its present schedule, the Fed will announce a reduction in bond purchases to $35 billion monthly, less than the Federal budget deficit, at its 2-day meeting ending on June 18. (Yes, I recognize that roughly half the Fed’s buys are of Federal agency securities, but at that point its overall support for the long term U.S. government bond market will have sunk below the Treasury’s “draw” from that market.) That point, at which the Fed is no longer financing the entire Treasury deficit, is likely to see some hiccups in the bond markets.

The other signal that normality may finally be returning can be seen in the latest month’s inflation figures and the relative strength since January 1 in the gold price (and in precious metal mining shares, an exceptionally beat-down sector.) December’s U.S. producer price index was up 0.4% on the month and its consumer price index up 0.3%. That’s hardly hyperinflation but it suggests that the exceptionally low inflation numbers of the last six months may be coming to an end. At the same time, while Google’s and Facebook’s quarterly earnings were greeted with wild market enthusiasm, Apple’s and Twitter’s were met with distinctly less rapture. A little rebalancing between the over-hyped sectors of the U.S. stock market and the precious metals sector may be a sign that rationality is beginning to return. We shall see.

A particularly important indicator will be the behavior of emerging market share indices relative to the U.S. index and, more important, relative to each other. Unlike the U.S. Standard and Poor’s 500 index, up 30% in 2013, the MSCI emerging market index fell about 12%. That weakness has continued into the New Year, and emerging market shares are now trading on around half the valuation of U.S. shares, even though emerging market growth is projected to be much better.

Within the emerging markets space, there is however a huge differential between those countries that have been well managed and those that have engaged in a wild spending spree on the back of easily available international capital. The four BRICs were able to get money far too easily, and have wasted it in socialist boondoggles in India and Brazil, megalomaniac boondoggles in Russia, and, in the case of China, in boondoggles that were both socialist and megalomaniac. They deserve to have a rough next few years, as do the even worse run polities of Argentina and Venezuela. Only a madman would invest in any of them.

However, there are emerging markets that do not suffer these flaws. First, there are emerging markets like Colombia, Malaysia and in the last year Mexico, that up to the present have been capably run, with modest budget deficits and interest rates above the rate of inflation. While they are not perfect polities, they are on the whole better run than the United States, Japan or most of Europe. They also have a considerable cost advantage, both directly in labor and indirectly in a relative lack of regulation.

Second, there are countries like most of Africa (not South Africa, in this respect an honorary BRIC) that are by no means well run, but that have enjoyed a sudden access to international markets through the miracle of modern telecommunications and can now exploit the immense advantage of the world’s lowest labor costs. The Nigerian oil sector, like those of Venezuela and Mexico (which may have changed since its new oil law passed in December), is suffering declining output and infinite corruption and state waste. However everything in Nigeria except oil is growing at 8% per annum in real terms and looks likely to continue doing so.

Thus many emerging markets, whether genuinely well run or simply very poor and enjoying new-found access to world markets, have every opportunity to continue growing, provided the world does not engage in a “credit crunch” and starve them of necessary foreign capital. There is no question that a credit crunch is coming; the malinvestment since the financial crisis of 2008 has been grotesque and continuing. However, the world’s money markets are tightening only gradually, and that’s not usually the signal for them to seize up.

Much more likely, they will continue to tighten at a modest pace, while inflation and precious metals prices rise, and conventionally fashionable assets enjoy increasing malinvestment. Eventually, the conventionally fashionable will suffer a downturn that is earth-shattering in its impact and lasts several years, while the over-investment is absorbed. At that point, gloom and despair will have returned to the market, and emerging markets like everyone else will have a miserable time.

We are not at the end of the “age of get rich quick” but we may be nearing it. Even more of a relief, rational concepts of valuation may now work rather better for investors than they did in 2013.

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(The Bear’s Lair is a weekly column that is intended to appear each Monday, an appropriately gloomy day of the week. Its rationale is that the proportion of “sell” recommendations put out by Wall Street houses remains far below that of “buy” recommendations. Accordingly, investors have an excess of positive information and very little negative information. The column thus takes the ursine view of life and the market, in the hope that it may be usefully different from what investors see elsewhere.)