John Cassidy's Dot.con is the most sweeping and definitive assessment published thus far of the stock market mania that swept this country in the late 1990s.
Cassidy, who covers economics and finance for The New Yorker finds many seeds for the boom: Vannerver Bush's 'memex' machine, the 'intellectual forerunner of the World Wide Web'; increasing popularity of 401K and IRAs, which introduced millions of Americans to the equity markets, giving rise to a 'stock market culture'; and the attention and hype in the late 80s and early 90s surrounding the 'information superhighway' promoted by the likes of Al Gore, Newt Gingrich and Nicolas Negroponte.
When Netscape went public in 1995, the internet-mania began a five-year run that was fueled in part by the media, the policies promoted by Alan Greenspan and the Federal Reserve, the rise of day trading and the deluge of IPOs brought to market by firms such as Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch and their analyst cheerleaders Mary Meeker and Henry Blodget. For anyone who got caught up in the mania and foundered in its eventual crash, Dot.con is a bittersweet trip down memory lane that Cassidy captures just perfectly.
1. From Memex to world wide web
2. Popular capitalism
3. Indformation superhighway
4. Netscape
5. The stock market
6. IPO
7. Yahoo!
8. Battle for the net
9. Irrational exuberance
10. Amazon.com
11. The new economy
12. A media bubble
13. Greenspan's green light
14. Euphoria
15. Queen of the net
16. Trading nation
17. Web dreams
18. Warning signs
19. The Fed strikes
20. Crash
21. Dead dotcoms
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