PBS: "Without Greenspan, the dotcom bubble and the Enron bubble would not have been possible"

Excellent documentary on Enron now for all of you all nighters.

but the disease that is "voodoo economics" is much deeper than that. Start with Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman. Greenspan was simply their corrupted disciple.

And the part that worries me is that Obama still has "friedmanites" advising him on the economy.

:P

Edited to substitute this for the

Which is why he keeps saying he has no choice but to dump every single penney we can still borrow into the banks, and that the country can't afford single-payer health care. It is Friedmanite top-down yet again, and complete disregard of the effectiveness of real bottom up programs. He's been taught to believe that social programs are government "gifts"--nice in a sort of Christian, sympathy for the underdog way, but a drain on the economy that have to be forsworn during hard times. I truly wish he would start listening to some economists instead of a business professor and a bunch of big bankers, for advice on what the U.S. economy needs. He seems to be accepting their attitude of superiority at face value, to the detriment of all of us.

I saw the dot com shell game first hand...a real con game that fueled an inflated market. I had an acquaintance who worked at one of the larger brokerage houses and he'd read me all the crazy proposals that were getting green light for funding in anticipation of taking the company "public"...and the bank would get its money back and more by soaking suckers looking for the "next big thing".

firms because I had a legitimate idea for a startup. One that would make lots of money.

So they invited me to sit in on the pitches from the "dotcommies" so I could learn how the VC people responded to things.

I thought these guys were all "masters of the universe" and such, but in reality, they were just a bunch of scam artists looking to make quick bucks.

Some of the the pitches I heard (and were green lighted) convinced me that the end of the dotcom era was rapidly approaching. But I had a lot of work to do ( finished the prototype, file the preliminary patents, etc).

Anyway, after the crash I got to do MY pitch. By then you could have pulled out a xerox machine that spit out legitimate $100 bills (10 of them) for every $100 bill you stuffed in it and they wouldn't fund it. I was told directly that if I couldn't PROVE a market of at least $1B, and that I would be the dominate player with at least 50% of that market within 3 years of founding, I could just forget VC money. Hell, I was INVENTING the market, my product didn't exist before I invented it! How do you prove the potential market of something nobody has?

Oh well, still sold my company (never did get any VC money) for $12.5 M a few years later.

I got into playing with computers and the internet in the Mid 90's and watched new markets pop up overnight...and did a couple on my own. It was an incredible time of both creativity and entrepeneurism...hopefully one that will return some day.

The VC world was/is bizarre...and I saw many "investors" and people with great ideas get taken by groups that would take control of all the intellectual property, try to IPO and then gut what was left. The same people who made money on the way up, made it on the way down. They didn't become the "smartest guys in the room" for no reason.

Currently I'm watching the death throws of radio stocks...an industry that played their own bubble for a decade and now those stocks aren't worth the paper they're printed on. These companies took on a ton of debt...and parlayed it into rising stock prices (the principals took big dividends) and now all those properties are worth 25% of what they were a year ago. It couldn't have happened to a bigger bunch of greedy bastards.

Congrats on selling your company and not getting sucked into the games. I followed a similar path to yours...I got involved in patents and other projects...sold my company and haven't looked back, just forward.

Cheers...

i'll look for it online. thanks