A 24-year-old Englishman with a ponytail waltzed into the offices of a London venture-capital company last month, gave a little talk and waltzed out again with a check for nearly half a million dollars. A recent graduate of Cambridge University, this young man had just made his first financial killing entirely on the strength of "a great software idea."
Is this a tale of dot-com glory or the stuff of global economic folly? Like a skier whispering lest she sets off an avalanche, the whole capitalist world is now waiting for the answer. As the pressure mounts, a few "New Economy" fund managers and market analysts have broken ranks to predict that this speculative market is about to end in tears.
Such defections suggest that some of the very people who have been feeding our pension funds to this voracious global beast now accept that the frenzied rise of dot-com share prices cannot be sustained. As market volatility mounts, we may soon know whether these reluctant prophets are right.