dot.con

A sceptical history of the internet / stock market boom which argues that what we have just witnessed wasn't simply a stock market bubble but a social and cultural phenomenon driven by broad historical forces. John Cassidy explains how these forces combined to produce the buying hysteria that drove the prices of loss-making companies into the stratosphere. Much has been made of Alan Greenspan's phrase 'irrational exuberance', but there was nothing irrational about what happened. dot.con describes and explains the all-too-human behaviour of the stock market bubble: how it got going, sustained itself for longer than anybody expected, and then, just when people were starting to think it might not be a speculative bubble after all, went pop.