I was there during the crypto-bubble, the housing market bubble, but I don’t have any memory of the internet/dotcom bubble, and I was not alive during the rail-road bubble.
However, I want to know what the thoughts of the people were during that time. During AI, that fact that it’s a bubble is more apparent but during the housing and dotcom, I feel like it was more subtle (or I am too naive).
Does anyone have any personal experience of what it was like at that time? Were people as skeptical as they are today? What were they right/wrong about? Were the attitudes different? What changed after the crash?
In 1997 everyone knew we were in a bubble. Alan Greenspan the Fed Chair publicly called it “Irrational Exuberance. ” If you got out of the market then you missed a market doubling and left significant upside on the table. It was insanity and everyone new it, much like today. There was a trend of people quitting their jibs to become full time day traders. Its easy to make money in an up market.
In the dot com collapse the effects were mostly felt in the tech sector. While the stock market slumped there was not a wave of banks failing. There were a lot of layoffs in the tech sector and IT jobs were hard to come by.
Yeah I had my dot-com job with tons of stock options and knew I was gonna be rich! Just gotta go public and… oh, what’s that, 3 waves of layoffs leaving a skeleton crew? Well shit. I’ll just go get another job and… well shit. Ok, handful of other geeks, let’s band together and scrape tiny contracts together in a desperate bid to eat and make rent. Guess I’m not rich anymore. :/