Who Is Getting Crushed In This Bull Market?

By now, every tidbit about this wondrous bull market gets benchmarked against the dotcom bubble. It’s different this time, we’re ceaselessly told, even on NPR. For one, the “Tech Bubble,” as it’s officially called now, is not tied to the larger stock market this time. So its implosion will be contained. I remember hearing the same in 1999.

And “Tech” is a rubbery term, these days. It covers online retailers, anything in the social media space where the business model, if there’s one at all, is based on collecting and monetizing personal data; it covers automakers, such as Tesla which struggles to build a couple of thousand cars a month, chipmakers that have their microchips manufactured at some fab in China, or biotechs with big dreams and no drugs. The bigger the losses, the more upward momentum these stocks have. Or had. Because now they’re getting crushed.

The debacle has become part of the public debate even on NPR, which is a terrible sign. And KQED, one of our radio stations in San Francisco – a city that had been particularly impacted by the implosion of the dotcom bubble and isn’t naive about it – aired a one-hour show Friday morning, titled, “Are we in another Tech Bubble?” The discussion between the host and the guests didn’t leave much room for the title’s question mark.

The same day, we had the first hints of catharsis, albeit premature and incomplete. “I remember back in 2000 how I just watched my assets shrink on a daily basis, stuck in disbelief as an unrelenting market did permanent damage to me,” wrote The Fly, a sharp-eyed stock market blogger. This isn’t some young googly-eyed trader who hasn’t seen anything but the supernatural five-year bull market that might have culminated last year with a 30% gain, and a lot more for the highfliers. The Fly has been through this before: “It would take me more than 3 years to rebuild my business and I never forgot those lessons, until about 8 weeks ago.”