To: westpacific who wrote (11165 ) 4/2/2004 10:37:06 AM From: SOROS Read Replies (1) | Respond to Greenspan made the irrational exuberance speech in December of 1996.The market was out of control then. It was also lower than it was now by a lot. No one wanted to take away the speculative punch bowl. And it got worse from there. The bubble never ended in my view. The market had to come down from Pluto and now it’s on Mars. The Nasdaq would have never have gone to 10,000. Consider that many of the companies making up Nasdaq 5,000 do not even exist any more. Remember that Wall Street sold those companies to the public. No business plan. No plan at all except for selling shares to the public. When the Nasdaq was at 5,000, many of these companies were “worth” tens of billions of dollars. El Cito (remember the commercial of the guy trying to urinate into the tall urinal with stilts?), Dr. Koop.com, Firepond.com, Metrocom, Internet.com (an actual company), Looksmart, Flag Telecom, Lifeminders.com, the list goes on and on and on. I keep a March 2000 Barron's just as a reminder. And these "companies" were sold to the public by the likes of the most well regarded investment banks in the world. And the only ones who were personally punished for these crimes were a few scapegoats like Jack Grubman, and Henry Blodget. What happened to those two worked just great in personalizing the situation to the public and making them feel like justice was served. But these guys didn’t operate in a vacuum like the mainstream sound-bite media would have you believe. Look here. I have a March 20, 2000 Barron’s. On page 27 is a read herring for the sale of 6 million shares of “Avenue A” stock at $24/share. The investment bankers involved were Morgan Stanley, Smith Barney, Thomas Weisel, Dain Rauscher, Janney Montgomery Scott, Raymond James, U.S. Bancorp, First Union, Edward Jones and Wit Soundview. So who was held personally responsible for this ill-fated secondary offering? Just the public who lost practically all of their money was ultimately held responsible for that one. And they got what they deserved, although I can’t say the same for the bankers. There were hundreds of cases like that one too!financialsense.com
