Underwriting the Internet

Chapter 1 Boom, Bust, and Recovery

The Internet Age, like most industrial epochs, was belatedly discovered by the hoi polloi because it arose so suddenly in the mid-1990s and revolved around not only arcane technology but atypical, almost maniacal financing. By 1999 the Nasdaq stock market that underwrote much of the dot-com (as in Amazon.com) phenomenon had surged to such frothy heights that an implosion was all but inevitable, even though media hypesters were cheering on a New Economy emerging from strong productivity gains that they predicted would keep the United States on an accelerating growth path. The vast wealth, created and lost in the blink of an eye, seared the ecstatic rise and agonizing collapse into the annals of business history ...