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Title: Dot.con : How America Lost Its Mind and Money in the Internet Era by John Cassidy ISBN: 0060008814 Publisher: Harperperennial Library Pub. Date: 13 May, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.53
Rating: 5
Summary: An Instant Classic
Comment: New Yorker financial writer, John Cassidy, says it all in this brilliantly rendered, highly entertaining account of the biggest economic scandal of the last twenty-five years--Enron who?--the crash and burn of the relentlessly hyped dot.com sector. One part historic overview, two parts searing indictman of the financial-technological-media nexus, Dot.Con--as the Wall Street Journal said last week--will be read by generations of Wharton and Harvard B school grads still unborn. Not since John Kenneth Galbraith have we had a popular economist with this kind of reach--or depth. Bravo.
Rating: 3
Summary: Good book, but many details have already been told
Comment: Dot.con: The Greatest Story Ever Sold lacks the same level of insight and originality. For most readers who stay abreast of current events in technology and the Internet, there is not a lot of new information in the book. The Internet bubble crashed some years ago, so a book on the subject can't be expected to be too original.
The book details the anecdotes of such Internet personality as Jeff Bezos, Mary Meeker, James Cramer, Jeff Walker, and Henry Blodgett. Nonetheless, such stories have been detailed in numerous places numerous times.
Cassidy does provide some rather good insights of the personality and mindset of Alan Greenspan, and he does a great job of showing an economic overview of the atmosphere that helped create the Internet bubble and how it led to its ultimate demise. If anything, Cassidy's brief biography of Greenspan is a well-written defense of the Fed Chairman.
But for anyone who reads Forbes, Wired, or the New York Times on a regular basis, much of the details of Dot.con have already been told. This is proven in the book's bibliography, which references such periodicals numerous times.
Rating: 4
Summary: Competent overview but not without flaws
Comment: The first thing you'd say about this book is that, however clever the title, it's erroneous: this isn't the story of a "con" at all, it's the story of a speculative bubble.
The whole point is that no-one was "conned" by the hot air. As Cassidy mentions from the outset, the prospectuses all contained large print health warnings in prominent places: "THIS COMPANY HAS NEVER MADE ANY MONEY, MOST LIKELY NEVER WILL" - but the punters still bought and bought. There were many psychological and sociological factors at play, but deception was not one of them.
For all that, Dot Con is well researched, well written and entertaining into the bargain (my copy was the paperback second edition in which the typos & manifest errors spotted by keen Amazonians (none of which, in my view, was earth-shattering) had been corrected). Cassidy describes briefly and competently the history of the internet and the general financial environment of the last 50 years, and then takes you into the maelstrom of the bubble from 1995 to 2001, all of which he portrays in suitably stunned-mullet fashion. The new edition features a lengthy epilogue which surveys the wreckage and covers the subsequent inquiry into the practices of investment banking firms and their uneasy relationships with their research analysts, all of which is still very current.
While he doesn't really dwell on it, I think Cassidy would come out in favour of more market regulation and intervention: He's especially critical of the Fed's approach to monetary policy and the atmosphere on the street which led to the boom in the first place.
In some ways (though it's hardly fashionable to say so) the investment banking firms and fund managers were as much victims of this as anyone: while the roof is blowing off the market and the choice is to join in and make hay, or watch your competitors annexing large portions of your market share while you sit on your hands, it is a singular Wall Street firm indeed which chooses to sit the boom out.
In any event this is a thoughtful and well put together book and serves as a pretty good overview of some of the most remarkable times in the history of modern finance.
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Title: F'd Companies: Spectacular Dot-Com Flameouts by Philip J. Kaplan ISBN: 0743228626 Publisher: Simon & Schuster Pub. Date: April, 2002 List Price(USD): $18.00 |
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Title: dot.bomb: My Days and Nights at an Internet Goliath by J. David Kuo ISBN: 0316507490 Publisher: Little Brown & Company Pub. Date: 15 October, 2001 List Price(USD): $25.95 |
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Title: Trading with the Enemy: Seduction and Betrayal on Jim Cramer's Wall Street by Nicholas W. Maier ISBN: 0060086513 Publisher: HarperBusiness Pub. Date: 05 March, 2002 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
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Title: Next: The Future Just Happened by Michael Lewis ISBN: 0393323528 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: May, 2002 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: A Very Public Offering: A Rebel's Story of Business Excess, Success, and Reckoning by Stephan Paternot ISBN: 0471007862 Publisher: John Wiley & Sons Pub. Date: 27 July, 2001 List Price(USD): $27.95 |
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