Buy, Lie, And Sell High

from the it's-all-part-of-the-process dept

Following the dot com bubble popping there was a tremendous amount of time wasted trying to pinpoint exactly who to blame. Just about everyone had fingers pointed in their direction: venture capitalists, bankers, stupid retail investors, politicians, engineers, MBAs and plenty of others. Those stories have quieted down a lot lately, but they seem to have inspired at least one book. Salon is running an interview with the author of a book that blames the investment bankers for the dot com boom. The book is called Buy, Lie, and Sell High and the author has some interesting points in the interview. He blames investment bankers (and Alan Greenspan) for knowing that they were propping up the bubble, even though they knew the companies weren't very strong. He also blames them for robbing the companies blind by underpricing the IPOs relative to demand to get that first day pop - which the press and retail investors seemed to love - but which really meant the company lost out on millions of dollars that went straight into the pockets of "friends" of the investment bankers. He also points out that, despite the "we'll never do that again" talk coming from bankers these days, they absolutely loved the bubble, and are looking for ways to create a new bubble as quickly as possible.
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  • identicon
    bob, 7 Aug 2002 @ 8:47am

    alan greenspan?

    he's going a bit far to say that alan greenspan knowingly endorsed the internet bubble. what's greenspan going to be remembered for? reminding us about "irrational exuberance" or for say in the late 90's that we were in a new period of low inflation and high productivity? my money's on irrational exuberance, which he tried to warn us about but nobody listened.

    besides, isn't greenspan allowed to be wrong once in his lifetime? greenspan is an economist, not an accountant -- he bases his judgements on data which, granted, may have been a little cooked, but he's not god and he doesn't control everything.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    u2604ab, 7 Aug 2002 @ 1:02pm

    Where are they now?

    Remember the 15-year-old who made buckets of cash by buying stocks, hyping them on yahoo message boards, and then just programming his computer to sell when the stocks hit a certain price?

    What happened to him?

    link to this | view in chronology ]


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