Dot.Con: The Real Story of Why the Internet Bubble Burst - Softcover

Cassidy, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0141006668 ISBN 13: 9780141006666

Publisher: Penguin, 2003

Synopsis

What really created the dot.com boom and bust? Who is to blame?

John Cassidy's sceptical history of the internet boom shows that this wasn't simply a stock market bubble but a social and cultural phenomenon driven by broad historical forces.

Dot.Con shows how the internet bubble reflected something about almost all of us, and what we thought about ourselves, as the twenty-first century dawned.

About this title

Review:

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. --Harry C Edwards

Review:

“ For those who thought we knew it all already, it’s the book we wish we had written” -- The Observer

“ John Cassidy has written the definitive history of the dot.com boom” -- The Sun

“Admirably lucid and comprehensive” -- The Guardian

“Thoroughly persuasive” -- The Economist

“a story about pre-millennial America, its hopes, fears and unquestioned assumptions.” -- The Sunday Times

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0141006668
• ISBN 13: 9780141006666
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 416