As the quantity theory indicates, the money supply will track changes in nominal GDP pretty closely: M = (1/v)*PQ. If you graphed nominal GDP you would probably mostly see the trend growth rate too, but that doesn't mean recessions don't happen (do a plot of the yearly growth rates of the series instead of the series itself).
As for the so-called "Greenspan bubble" I think it is mostly just a myth if you mean bubbles are caused by excessively low interest rates and too-rapid money creation. For example, US house prices started diverging from previous trends in 1995, at a time when Greenspan was actually raising interest rates. Greenspan can be blamed instead for trying to get a little more mileage out of a weak recovery by stupidly telling people to take out ARMs a couple of years ago.
The real culprits are IMHO financial deregulation and exploding income inequality, the combination of which channels ever more funds to increasingly exotic investments in search of higher returns. Real interest rates were on average lower before 1970 than they have been since, and we didn't have these kind of asset bubbles developing.
There has been a technological sea change, enabling much faster creation and trade of all sorts of financial instruments, and computer driven, arbitrage-seeking trading strategies driving massive volumes.
There has been an ideological sea change, making greed good, and defining monetary value as the main arbiter of value, leading to a focus on financial management as opposed to industrial or soci-economic strategies.
There have been massive global imbalances, requiring a lot more financial engineering to deal with. In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
And a useful redefinition and splitting of the working classes into pseudo-managerial and pseudo-entrepreunerial roles which give the illusion of participation while denying real power, while making unionisation very much more difficult.
So asset bubbles and busts enabled by technological change and transmitted through international financial markets are nothing new in the long view, although they are new for us.
