There WILL be a bust (Score 1)

Regardless of whether the next bust will affect Web 2.0 (I agree with the above analysis that this will be a blip), there WILL be an economy-wide bust. We are poised for it, just as we were around 1997, and for the exact same reason: the Fed pumping the money supply like there's no fucking tomorrow.

I can't believe there are two hundred off comments and not a single one (that I saw), on the actual reason for the .com boom (and hence the bust) in the first place. P/E ratios of 50 are supposed to be a _good_ sign? As if the fact that they are not >100 _yet_ implies that we are magically in a post-business-cycle world?

The signs are all around you. Weak dollar internationally, impossibly low unemployment, government spending through the roof, rock bottom interest rates year after year while the Fed stops publishing M3, starts emphasizing "core inflation" (i.e. inflation without food and energy), starts changing the goods in the CPI commodity basket (i.e. removing the ones that are rising the fastest because they are "too volatile").

The economy is being rotted from the core by malinvestment, in every sector, caused by years of artificially loose credit. It's completely unsustainable. Clinton's Fed inflated at top rates of 15% per year. Bush's has pushed 20%, and all of the dancing with the numbers is not going to magically make all those malivestments profitable when the shit hits the fan.