Cheap money is fuelling rapid growth on Russia's markets but concerns are growing that the boom could be going too far, too fast.
With its oil fetching $30 a barrel, the world's number two crude exporter is awash with petrodollars.
And the weak dollar and relative stability of recent years have convinced millions of Russians to turn hard currency savings hoarded under the mattress into roubles and lured home some "flight" capital from abroad.
Rather than let demand for roubles help the currency regain more of the ground lost in the 1998 financial collapse, the authorities are trying to hold down the exchange rate, now at a three-year high, with dollar-buying intervention.
The upshot has been an explosion in money supply - M2 is up 57 percent in the year to March 1 - which has in turn fuelled breakneck growth in stock, bond and property markets.
Russian shares have nearly doubled in the past 12 months, the corporate rouble bond market has grown twofold. Those developments, and the breakneck pace of housing construction in Moscow, are proof enough that the boom times are already here.
A bubble economy? Not yet, says Peter Westin, economist at Aton Capital in Moscow: "I don't see any roadblocks. What could burst the bubble? The economy is so robust," he said.
But there are voices warning that printing money to keep the exchange rate down may not be sustainable, especially as the strategy has blunted interest rates as a policy tool, making it too easy to borrow money.
Short-term interbank rates are below one percent, rendering useless the central bank's 14 percent refinancing rate. Firms are finding ready takers for rouble bonds paying negative real rates in a young market which has yet to see a default.
"There aren't any examples in history of any countries with this kind of growth in the financial sector. If it continues for a number of years there are going to be problems," cautions Edward Parker, a sovereign analyst at Fitch Ratings in London.
Add Russia's immature banking system and narrow financial markets and you have a recipe for trouble if the oil price dives or the political stability embodied by President Vladimir Putin is shaken.
"If money is cheap, it's not going to be used wisely," said Parker.
To be fair, the authorities did hit their inflation target of 10 percent last year - the first time they have done so since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 - as barriers to the fast circulation of money curbed inflation pressures.
Former deputy central bank head Oleg Vyugin, just named head of a new financial markets super-regulator, also deserves credit for introducing new measures, such as reverse repo operations, to soak up some market liquidity.
No replacement at the central bank has been chosen, but whoever gets the job will have to deal with a market increasingly betting that rouble appreciation will happen.
Alexei Moisseev, fixed income analyst at Renaissance Capital, reckons the crunch could come as soon as the second quarter and recently issued a note to clients advising them to buy local bonds on expectations of rouble gains.
Capping the exchange rate "is not a viable policy for the central bank in the second quarter", Moisseev told Reuters, adding Russia would have to free the rouble if it wants interest rates to normalise.
"The day they let the rouble freely fluctuate and find its own level will be the day when you get real interest rates."
The new government has other priorities, however. Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Zhukov told Reuters on Monday he wants to abandon its policy of running budget surpluses to fund a pro-growth cut in payroll taxes next year.
The surpluses have been a plank of policy for the past four years - and an important way to sterilise excess cash.
And although the government expects to collect $10 billion this year in a stabilisation fund set up to gather windfall oil revenues, it may still be taking a gamble in its bid to realise Putin's goal of doubling the size of the economy in a decade.
But for now, few see a 1998-style collapse on the horizon.
"There is a huge amount of money flowing into Russia...and this has led to bubbles," said Christof Ruehl of the World Bank. "But this is not yet an economy-wide bubble. This is not 1998.