Er, hang on, wasn't that eleven months ago?
April 17 2000 - that was the day. I recall. I was there at the ASX, walking around the place trying to interview "ordinary investors" about their impending financial doom. Stan Grant was there too, doing pretty much the same thing. It was news at the time, I'm pretty sure. It is not news now.
I am evidently disagreed with by the team at the insomniac's worst nightmare, USA Today. That show last night called in a slew of Wall Street analysts to discuss the dot-com phenomenon, just how overhyped the market was, and where it all went wrong. An interstate discussion forum was followed by a case study, a tale of one ordinary American who has sworn out of the stockmarket, for now anyway, because he lost some money on tech stocks. It even showed footage of this poor fat chump at home with his poor fat wife and poor fat kids. The poor fat kids were riding trikes, which is, like, really innocent.
Then, from the USA Today anchor, a quick explanation of the word "trillion", a word it is impossible to do without when explaining the gnarled fate of the Nasdaq. "Yes folks, that's ter-rillion, with a tee-arr. One thousand billion." Has there been a more recent correction I didn't hear about?
If there hasn't been, then as far as I can see the discussion was over long ago. Everyone involved knew at the time that tech stocks were overhyped and valued entirely on speculative merits. It was all going to come to an end one day. And then it did. What more is there to say?
I recall conferring with my editors a week or so after April 17, discussing the merits of a follow-up article, a one-week-on. I thought one-year-ons were reserved for Princess Diana.
There has to be a point where something turns from news into modern history. Then it usually takes several centuries to make the transition into ancient history. With the Internet bubble it took eleven months.
