I am currently wading my way through Edward Chancellor's excellent book Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation. Chancellor takes the reader from the earliest recorded instances of financial speculation during the Roman Republic to the speculative bubbles of the 1980s. Speculative bubbles are nothing new and the reader finds out that they even have names, like the South Sea Bubble in Great Britain in 1720.

Not surprisingly, bubbles are often created during the advent of a new industry. Snaring many a gullible investor with the potential of a new technology has lead to many bubbles in the past as well. Sound familiar? Reading along has left me wondering what exactly the recently burst high tech bubble of the late '90s will be called in the history books of the future.

A July 14 Wall Street Journal article dubbed the recently burst bubble as the "Great Internet Bubble." I call it the "Dot.com Bubble." Whatever. Even though it is argued that the New York Stock Exchange is highly overvalued, there is no doubt that the defining factor of the recently burst speculative bubble has been the creation of recently nonexistent Dot.com start-ups and the wave of subsequent Dot.com IPOs.

There is no doubt that the Dot.com Bubble has burst as current issues of the Puget Sound Business Journal contain weekly dispatches about Dot.com cash crunches, layoffs, IPOs being put on hold due to lack of investor interest, bankruptcies, mergers, etc. The party is over. The only question remaining is how many corpses will be left behind.

Perhaps never in the history of financial speculation has irrational exuberance been so irrational. One money losing e-commerce company after another found itself with market capitalizations valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars after issuing IPOs. The most notable example was the Globe.com's offering, which saw its share price soar to $97 from $9, a record breaking increase of 866 percent on the first day of trading. A money losing start-up had been transformed overnight into a company with a market capitalization of almost a billion dollars. The Globe.com closed on July 13 at $1.8125, or $3.625 after a split.

Mass media propaganda about the Dot.com Bubble in recent years has been filled with fantasies spawned by technophile hokum. Fairy tales of a "New Economy" replacing an "Old Economy" with the advent of e-commerce abounded throughout the Dot.com Bubble. The old fashioned brick and mortar businesses were "anachronisms" about to be swept into the dust bin of history. "Buy! buy! buy!," the technophiles said while selling their IPOs to an all too gullible public. "Yes, our Dot.com start-ups are big time money losers, but don't worry, profitability is just around the corner!"

Quite frankly, as a non-believer, I don't see how ordering something over the Internet is creating a "New Economy" as it seems to me just a new way to distribute commodities. I have been on the Internet for over three years now and I even ordered a ticket for a concert once. I did the same thing I would have done if I had ordered that same ticket over the phone: purchase a concert ticket. So why the collective orgasm by all the closeted technophiles living their "lives" on the Web?

Every speculative bubble creates winners who become fabulously wealthy and losers who go bankrupt. The Dot.com Bubble has been no different and it's time for the former Dot.com "millionaires" to show everybody their worthless stock certificates and the credit cards they ran up purchasing them. The beauty of the recent bursting of the Dot.com Bubble is that it will have no immediate deleterious effects on those working people who moved to Seattle because they thought it might be a good place to live. On the other hand, the potentially long term deleterious effects on the people who move here every year to buy low, sell high and move onto their next scams will be eminently desirable. These people should be fucked, broken, and driven across the land.

Every financial crisis creates an opportunity and the Dot.com Bubble is no different. Seattle should not squander this opportunity for lowering property values in the city. There is a lot of talk in the press these days about creating affordable housing in Seattle and we should see the Dot.com Bubble as an opportunity to advance such a worthy cause. Every speculative bubble leads to suicides as the speculator sees his/her prospects of a future of easy living evaporate almost overnight. Hence, I recommend the city erect a "Yuppie.com Dive Board" on the Aurora Bridge. This would be an appropriate location as it is located next to Adobe. The "Yuppie.com Dive Board" would be guarded around the clock by an SPD officer. The only thing a potential diver would need to complete their exit from this world would be to present the on-duty officer with his/her worthless or near worthless dot.com stock certificates. Not only would such a proposal have the eminently desirable effect of lowering property values, it would see the SPD actually performing a public service for a change.

The rational mind reads Devil Take The Hindmost with a sense of mounting gloom. You begin to feel like humanity is stuck in a kind of Star Trek time warp, whereby a significant portion of the population is guaranteed to be duped into yet another speculative financial scam. There was no rational reason to buy into a bunch of money losing e-commerce start-ups but a significant number of people did it anyway. Yet today this socially destructive model of investment is enabled by a system of regulation and public subsidy that only encourages it. The speculative model of investment has moved into other areas, like global currency exchange rates and savings and loans, with predictably disastrous consequences.

Meanwhile, the Dot.com carcass is quickly being transported for burial at the Speculation Cemetery. It's time for the winners of the Dot.com Bubble to move onto their next scam and they can bet there will be a willing public eager to play the market by running up credit card debt again.