While I’m wondering about your access to Netflix given where you are, a funny/depressing/infuriating take on what was going on in the dot-com boom can be found in the documentary Startup.com. It shows just how much money credulous venture capitalists were willing to throw at any self-important delusional 20-something with a vague business plan that left out the crucial step 2. ??? but included the all important dot-com domain.
Oh, you might also check out the archives of www.f__kedcompany.com (the two missing letters are what you think they are). This guy got his start chronicling the post bubble-burst meltdown in previously high-flying tech companies.
By the way, in possibly-egregious proof that no one learns anything from anything, and in a remarkably short period of time, since about a year and a half ago, there’s been the emergence of a lot of “Web 2.0” talk. This time, of course, there will be no bust. This time, you see, it’s all about, uh, social networking sites, and investment in those can’t possibly go wrong. While I can see one significant difference between now and 2000 – ready availability of bandwidth and reliable multimedia access, which certainly is driving a lot of media-downloading growth – I’m not sure the complacency I see among some No. Cal. types is completely rational.
9/11 actually didn’t have that much of a lasting effect on the stock market. There was a huge plunge immediately after, but by the end of the year it had pretty much recovered what had been lost. The big, sustained drop was from early 2002, continuing through 2003.
Thank you all. You know what I really need for all this? A good handle on the price of oil, preferably in dollars and euros to show the decline of the dollar. Like on 1 January for each year in the decade.
I have been meaning to start a thread on the subject.
Finally, you did not ask this, but here is gold versus oil, which is indirectly suggestive of the fact that oil isn’t all that expensive today – it’s just that the dollar has started blowing big-time against all real commodities:
Actually that one is older than I’d like, but it’s a start.
Oh, and as a companion to the movie I suggested on the dot-com idiocy, you might want to check out this documentary. Good insight into what the corporate fraudsters at Enron were up to and the culture that enabled it.
My goal was always to be an infamous author . . . .
What’s your general thesis/object for your writing project? Reading/writing about global economic trends can indeed be interesting. There’s a lot of history, psychology, etc. behind how different investments get priced, rise, fall, etc.
Jim Rogers is a go-to guy on commodities trends if that is an area of particular interest to you.
I was in the middle of it. I was theoretically a multimillionaire based on my options. Grrr.
There was actually very little fraud in Silicon Valley. Lots of stupidity, though.
First of all, with very little experience in online sales, companies were unrealistic. No one was going to profitably sell 40 pound bags of dog food on line, for instance. Second, even if there was a market, 20 companies were able to convince vcs to support them, so the failure of most was inevitable. Third, awash with money, a lot of dot coms with inexperienced management threw it away on expensive offices and perqs. We, a fairly established and large company, provided money for Christmas dinners at expensive restaurants with gift for both employees and spouses.
But here is why everything crashed so badly. Looking at the growth of equipment orders, companies ramped up to produce it. Not dumb companies - I heard a VP of Intel give a totally unrealistic (in retrospect) forecast for the server market. Companies staffed up for the demand. Since some contract manufacturers had problems keeping up, some companies double ordered. We could sell stuff with little effort, and the last thing you wanted was to be short on product when the latest dot com came calling. The manufacturing model called for the contract manufacturer to buy material, and the system company to buy it from them.
When the merry-go-round stopped people started canceling orders, and the CMs were left with a lot of components on hand. If you weren’t careful, the system companies had lots of inventory also. Cisco wrote off a couple of billion dollars of inventory. To make things worse, the dead dot coms sold their equipment at firesale prices, so there was a ton of cheap equipment on the used market with further cut into sales until it became obsolete. Finally, companies had staffed up for unrealistic volumes, so there were tons of layoffs.
I don’t know if you remember them, but the best indication of the problem was the dot com ads for the 2000 (or was it 2001) Super Bowl, some of which laughed about how they were throwing away money.
True, I am conflating the two events. Still trying to describe Enron is tough. It did this and that, and claimed to do that but also was in this other thing. Very hard to explain, even now.
I don’t know if the American business magazines (Fortune, Business Week, Forbes) archives are on line but they did great articles on Enron explaining every aspect of what went on.