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Politics : Formerly About Applied Materials -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Feraldo who wrote (45859)	4/24/2001 4:43:18 PM
From: Jacob Snyder	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 70976

re: As long as they learn from their mistakes in the second and third runs of the internet boom, then its o.k. The evidence of history is that they won't learn. The history of the telecom and internet buildout is exactly following the history of the railroad buildout in the 1800s. The parallels are amazing. The railroad buildout had periods of too-easy credit (when any idiot with any idiotic idea could get funding), which alternated with periods of no credit availability (when even good ideas went bankrupt for lack of funding to finish projects). The credit spigot got turned on and off, over and over and over, for the 50 years between the Civil War and WWI. No one ever learned anything from past experience, no matter how painful that experience was. You had "investors" in Europe (whose knowledge of American geography was very vague), funding a couple of railroad companies, who would be racing to complete parallel lines to an empty spot on the prairie. Stock promoters would sell these shares, painting a picture of immense future profits, when most railroad companies (just like most airlines, and today, most CLECs) eventually went bankrupt. If the rail lines got built, and if settlers rapidly filled up the empty prairie with towns and farms, then there might be adequate business to make one of the railroads profitable. That's assuming the people running the railroad companies were honest and efficient, which they frequently weren't. My point is that, while the gadgets we surround ourselves with change, we investors are still the same emotional herd animals we've always been. And always will be.