March 2000 And The New Exuberant Irrationality

Can you say March 2000?

We’d give it a try—or at least a quick recall. Start with the fact that the NASDAQ 100 had been rising strongly in response to the tech revolution and stood at 805 a few weeks before Alan Greenspan’s famous “irrational exuberance” speech in December 1996.

In the latter he inquired as to whether that very thing might be happening, and, as it did happen, he was on to something. Yet he never did anything about it other than a feckless one-time increase in rates in the spring of 1997.