5,048.62. That beguilingly pedestrian figure — most numbers are, once
untethered from their context — marked the point at which one of history's
most spectacular financial bubbles popped. Three years ago tomorrow, it
was the closing number for the Nasdaq composite, the market index for all
those "new economy" tech stocks.
It proved to be the high for an index that came to reflect far more
than the actual value of Americans' ownership in a set of companies. Stock
markets, after all, chart society's mood as much as anything — which helps
explain why the Dow Jones industrial average was only a single point
higher at the end of 1981 than it was at the end of 1964.
March 10, 2000, does not seem like a long time ago solely because the
Nasdaq is now at 1,305.29. Americans at the turn of the millennium, before
the botched presidential election, the collapse of Enron and the Sept. 11 attacks, viewed theirs as a
moment of extravagant opportunity. So many of the old constraints — from
the cold war's sense of peril to the business cycle — seemed a thing of
the past. On that day, a Friday, our colleague Thomas L. Friedman
complained in his column that foreign policy was not an issue in the
presidential campaign, "due in part to the relative peace and prosperity
America now enjoys." At neighborhood barbershops, people were talking
stocks. The feverish deal of the week three years ago was VeriSign's acquisition of Network
Solutions. Most people were fuzzy on exactly what these Internet companies
did, but whatever it was, it was worth some $20 billion.
Americans no longer expect to see the Nasdaq at 5,000 again anytime
soon, if ever. Not that the market's rebound is our main concern.
Americans these days feel as if they've lost far more than a few trillions
in the stock market. We mourn the passing of that moment of extravagant
opportunity.
