As my plane left San Jose International Airport for the friendly skies last Monday, I looked down and saw what appeared to be a massive plume of smoke, mushroom-shaped, rising from the heart of Silicon Valley.
Back safe and sound in the nation’s capital, I now think I know what I think I saw.
I’m not real big on conspiracy theories, but guess who were in northern California strutting their stuff just before the Valley imploded? Bill and Hillary! Not together, of course.
They say the Clintons leave a path of destruction behind them wherever they go. I don’t believe it for a minute. Just the same, there was Hillary chatting up a storm at a high-tech woman’s conference in San Francisco amid cat calls about the first lady using taxpayer White House funds to subsidize travel for her New York Senate run.
And Bill? Bill was in the Valley stumping for China free trade. The prez, we all know, first cooled off Nasdaq and sent it south with that great biotech patent statement he and Brit Tony Blair concocted a few weeks back.
One or both of the Clintons stopped by Steve Jobs’ place for some feel-good talk about, I suspect, Apple’s comeback and Bill Gates’ little antitrust problem. I didn’t get an invite from Jobs, but I’ll get over it.
Perhaps Nasdaq’s downturn will get Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan off the hook insofar as another interest-rate hike. Right.
Given Nasdaq’s nadir, you’ve got to feel for all those Valley folks who just purchased pricey homes-inches from each other and at inflated prices-with stock options now worth half their value.
The signs have been there for a while, but what daytrader or institutional investor can walk away from dot-coms and wireless data start-ups that quadruple in value by the hour. And vice versa. Did you know Stanford University, a high-tech hotbed in the Valley, is mulling its own dot-com IP0?
Chalk it up to flashy advertising, slick accounting, sloppy auditing and greedy investors.
As for myself, I knew things were bad when an April 1, front-page San Jose Mercury News story-about online firms being low on cash-got nearly equal play as the new Pac Bell Park in San Francisco. Pity all the Nasdaq true believers who came to believe that profitability is passe. I guess you could call them April fools.
Not everyone is getting hosed though. Law firms and Wall Street houses that underwrite dot-com IPOs are making money. And so are dot-com directors; they’re just multimillionaires instead of billionaires. Madison Avenue is having a field day with dot-com ad accounts too.
In fact, everybody is making dot-com money, except dot-coms.
Oh, this New Economy. You’ve got to lose money to lose money.
