The dotcom bubble and the stock market fall in 2000-2001

Authors Avatar

«The dotcom bubble

and the stock market fall in 2000-2001»


OUTLINE

  1. Introduction

To introduce the topic, I’m going to address the importance of examining this crisis in detail and describe in a nutshell what actually happened.

  1. Main body
  • The reasons of the dotcom bubble burst
  • Theoretical explanation of what happens during the financial bubble
  • What are the consequences of this particular event?

  1. Conclusion

Summary of the main points covered in my essay. How did the dotcom bubble burst contribute to the economic crisis of the 2008? Could we expect the similar crisis and how can it be prevented? What are the lessons that should have been learned from the dotcom crisis?


INTRODUCTION

When the global financial crisis occurred in 2008, both experts and general public started heated discussion as everyone was eager to identify the reasons for such a calamity. It is clear that nothing happens with no reason at all. Let’s consider the famous speech of Ben Bernanke, who is the Chairman of the Federal Reserve System. In that testimony he tried to explain the causes of the recent financial and economic crisis to the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, highlighting the vulnerabilities in different sectors of economics. The idea of inadequate risk-measurement that he focused on is very important for us, as this particular issue makes the recent crisis akin to the dotcom bubble we are about to examine in detail. (The same idea is one of the major issues of the next Ben Bernanke’s speeches, where he underlines the importance of reasonable risk management and possible destructive effects of being too optimistic about the future of the economic system). To sum up, experts claim that flaws in evaluating the perspectives of new technologies in the 90ies caused the dotcom bubble burst in 2000, while the inadequate risk-measurement of the financial instruments connected to mortgages led to the global financial and economic crisis in 2008. Could we have predicted the economic disaster coming in 2008 and which lessons could have been gathered from the dotcom crisis? These are the questions that make the topic urgent and exciting to examine.


To begin with, let’s define the key term. What is a dotcom? Dotcom is a firm conducting its business mainly over the Internet. They usually possess a Web site intended for business use. The term is based on the «com» that forms the last part of the address for most commercial Web-sites.

Now, what were the reasons for the dotcom bubble burst and what actually happened? (We should mention that this phenomenon is also referred as the Internet bubble and the Information Technology Bubble in many articles). It all started during the mid 1990′s. The Internet was extremely popular those days and the Stock Market soared on technology and Internet stocks. Stock prices were rising and it seemed there was to limit for their value to expand. The masses believed there was a new world coming and the Internet was for sure to become the future of business. The steady confidence took place that the e-companies would turn future profits and there is no limit for technologies development. These expectations were reflected in the NASDAQ composite index. The NASDAQ composite is a stock market index of the common stocks and similar securities, which are listed on the NASDAQ stock market. The index reflects the performance of stocks of technology companies and growth companies. From January 1994 to February 2000, the it rose from 776.80 to 4,696.69, a 605% increase, and was influenced mainly by prices of high-technology stocks. But these expectations turned out to be far too positive. The market became overvalued. The Stock Market crashed. The culmination happened on March 10, 2000, with the NASDAQ peaking at 5132.52 in intraday trading before closing at 5048.62. (see the graph 1)

Join now!

Graph 1. NASDAQ composite dynamics

The period when the bubble expanded rapidly was marked by the founding of many new small Internet-based companies commonly referred to as dotcoms. Many of them failed in 2000. A very specific phenomenon could be noticed at that time – the way for a new unknown company to become prosperous was just to add an "e-" prefix to their name or a ".com" to the end. One of the authors called it "prefix investing", as the result of this simple renaming was the incredible growth of stock prices. I suppose that was one of ...

This is a preview of the whole essay