Time Warner's one-two megamerger punch, first with America Online then with British music giant EMI Group, followed last week by shares of Yahoo Japan Corp. exceeding 100 million yen, sent many investors and observers searching for a psychological safety blanket.
Surely there must be an escape-hatch to this madness of inflated dot-com stocks, and the ripples of excess they create with each new transaction.
It was bad enough when the syndrome seemed rampant mainly in the United States. Now it has extended to Asia with the expectation of many that Internet globalization may spread faster and even more profitably over here than back there.