There is a style of newspaper headline that is dramatic, immediate and absolutely unequivocal – except for an additional little tailpiece, which suggests that things are less dramatic, possibly not immediate, and actually not unequivocal at all. This kind of headline is crucial in situations where something has happened but actually you are not quite sure what is going on. We saw a version of it inWell, that is very dramatic. Or it would be, were it not for the “For Now” added at the end.
Yet – and this is the thing – it’s important to know there are differences between 2000 and 2022 and what precisely they are. I’m long enough in the tooth to remember the 2000 dot.com bubble, and trust me, the context was entirely different. And third, in 2000, it was still an open question whether tech was a sustainably valuable and meaningful sector. Whatever the current doubts are about valuations, there is not the slightest doubt in anyone’s mind that tech is going to be a meaningful part of our lives in the future. You can see this in the valuation of tech stocks overall, which, even after the selloff, still make up about 27% of the S&P 500. We are talking about a different order of magnitude.