Dot.con : the greatest story ever sold

This is a sceptical history of the internet/stock market boom.

John Cassidy argues that what we have just witnessed wasn't simply a stock market bubble; it was a social and cultural phenomenon driven by broad historical forces.

Cassidy explains how these forces combined to produce the buying hysteria that drove the prices of loss-making companies into the stratosphere.

Much has been made of Alan Greenspan's phrase "irrational exuberance", but Cassidy shows that there was nothing irrational about what happened.

The people involved - fund managers, stock analysts, journalists and pundits - were simply acting in their own self-interest.Technology provided the raw material for the boom, but that is only part of the story. "Dot.con" describes and explains the all-too-human behaviour of the stock market bubble: how it got going; sustained itself for longer than anybody expected; and then, just when people were starting to think it might not be a speculative bubble after all, went pop.