WHY NOW?

One sound bite still lingers from the days before the Great Dot-Com Crash of 2000, courtesy of an investment banker who insisted he wasn’t concerned about the tsunami of funding sloshing around the IPO market. “It’s Wall Street’s job to throw money at companies,” he said. And investors’ job to sort the winners from the losers.

Throw money Wall Street did—to any entity ending in run by any group of idiots. How much? There were 486 IPOs in 1999, which collected $92.2 billion, and another 406 in 2000, for another $96.7 billion. Inflation-adjusted, that’s $283 billion worth