Get over the Bubble already

The blogosphere needs to get over its obsession with there being another market bubble. Yes, there is a lot of hype around Web 2.0, and many of the start-ups will fail, but none of these "signs" of a bubble have anything to do with the dot-com bubble. That was a singularity, not a model for a repeating cycle. Do any of these reasons for the stock market rise in the late Nineties pertain to today?

• Massive rebuilding of infrastructure in preparation for Y2K. Corporate IT departments around the world bought new computers to replace those that were suspect and hired legions of programmers to check and rewrite code. These programmers were no longer needed after January 1, 2000, just before the crash.
• Deregulation of telcos in 1996 which set that industry on a massive capital expenditure binge.
• The adoption of the Internet. It didn't live up to all of its promise in the first few years, but the mass-market, commercial Internet which appeared in the mid-Nineties will be a major force for change for decades to come. Just because we are calling this Web 2.0, doesn't mean that there is any expectation that this will be as big as the first wave of adoption. That is no longer mathematically possible.
• The intervention by the Federal Reserve in the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management in the fall of 1998 pumped massive liquidity into the financial system, much of which eventually sloshed into the equity markets.

The term perfect storm is over used, especially by headline writers, but the dot-com boom was such a singular event, and the following bust was equally severe. All of its survivors have to calm their nerves and accept a good thing while it is here, rather than wringing their hands and worrying about the next bust.