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A sobering denouement had to come...exponential growth is a potent delusion-maker, and in 1999, 10 years after the Nikkei’s peak, I was thinking about the Japanese experience as we were waiting to claim our rental car at San Francisco airport. Silicon Valley was years into its first dotcom bubble, and even with advance reservations people had to wait for the just-returned cars to get serviced and released again into the halting traffic on the clogged Bayshore freeway. Mindful of the Japanese experience, I was thinking that every year after 1995 might be the last spell of what Alan Greenspan famously called irrational exuberance, but it was not in 1996 or 1997 or 1998. And even more so than a decade earlier, there were many economists ready to assure American investors that this spell of exponential growth was really different, that the old rules do not apply in the New Economy where endless rapid growth will readily continue.
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