When Lowenstein doesn't get (yet) is that things are turning ugly. Mish is reporting increased suicide calls to hotlines, for example.

Some smart politicians are picking up on this. Very soon it's going to be, "It's the economy, stupid," yet again, but this time it's going to be very different. Lots of people are getting freaked.

Oh, and reminiscent of Bear, Lehman top execs are called to an emergency meeting this weekend. What do you suppose they could be talking about? Seems like it's not just the small fry that are getting freaked out.

This was not a dot com bubble. The dot com companies did not have the resources (money) to fuel the bubble.

it was a Y2k bubble. In 1999 and 2000 30%-50% of large institutions' capital budgets were being spent on IT infrastructure.

Why? Because if the equipment was out of warranty (even if it was a LAN Switch, which is y2k immune), the vendors recommended replacing it. The IT Vendors raped their customers.

The normal percentage of IT expenses in the capital budget was 6-12%. What did the executive do after such a cost? Cut the IT capital budget to zero, as they should, for three to five years.

The real culprits. Cisco, IBM, HP, Compaq, and their like. Nice of them to deflect blame onto the dot com companies, which were only guilty of hype. But the real blame lies to the feet of the large IT vendors, and their actions in raping their customers.

How do I know this? I set the date on a bunch of IBM RS/6000 25Ts to 1971, to roll over from 1999 to 2000 and not affect operation. And guess what? It worked.

More shock capitalism. Thieves, all of them.