Comment by sabat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sabat | Hacker News Reader

My thoughts exactly. Anyone who thinks were in a tech bubble doesn't understand what those words mean. We are not in a stock market bubble. And a stock market bubble was what burst in 2000. The downturn in the economy was not caused by small startups failing, but by new, swollen public companies shutting their doors.

If Facebook, Meebo, Bebo, Plentyoffish, iminlikewithyou, justin.tv, reddit, digg, Pandora, Last.fm, Hotornot, TechCrunch, PodShow, Boing Boing, Life Hacker, Prosper.com, 43 Things, SixApart, Gawker Media, 37 Signals, Wordpress.com, Scribd, and Zimbra all went out of business tomorrow, simultaneously, we would not see the huge rash of pink slips we saw in 2000. The stock market would not crash because of it.

It's not the same at all. Funny names != a bubble, and neither do over-valuations by private investors, and neither does a lot of entrepreneurs trying to start companies. It's called capitalism. Get used to it.

Indeed. We're not in a tech bubble -- we're in a real estate bubble. And as far as the crash of that market is concerned, we're still in the early part of March 10, 2000. The real pain has yet to begin.

The bottom line is that I wouldn't go whistling past the graveyard quite yet. A truly astronomical amount of debt has been accumulated by normal (i.e. not rich) people in the process of puffing up US home values. Unlike the dot-com crash, a worst-case scenario in the housing market wipes out the finances of a huge block of US consumers. And without free-spending, US consumers you can kiss the market for most small internet companies goodbye.

The apocalypse doesn't have to come from within; the people who are worried about a "tech" bubble aren't paying attention.

also, with the value of the dollar plunging below even the canadian dollar, the US stock market prices in terms of euros, for example, haven't been climbing that much, iirc (might even be declining?). someone can probably point to a graph of US stock prices in euros, but it's interesting, as i recall.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com