25, 1997: President Bill Clinton has been letting big campaign contributors stay in the Lincoln bedroom! The White House released a list of morethan 800 people who stayed overnight in the room where President Lincoln
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signed the proclamation freeing America’s slaves. The guests—including Hollywood moguls and stars—came through with at least $5.4 million in contributions to the Democratic National Committee in 1995 and 1996 alone,according to a computerized study commissioned by CNN. Producer StevenSpielberg donated $336,023, and MCA Chairman Lew Wasserman gave$225,000. The tawdriness is troubling.March 3, 1997: A crisis is unfolding far away. It seems that cheap Chineselabor is taking away Thailand’s share of the electronics export market. Thecountry’s fabulous growth has slowed so much that the banks are neck-deepin bad loans to real estate speculators, and a devaluation of the currency—thebaht—is probable. The stock exchange temporarily halted trading in bankstocks today. An incomprehensible feeling of disquietude seizes me, as if thisnews concealed some terrible menace. I walk up and down my hallway, oppressed by a feeling of confusion and irresistible fear.July 8, 1997: NASA uses the Internet to broadcast images taken by thePathfinder spacecraft on Mars. An Internet traffic record is set: 46 millionhits in one day. These stunning displays of twentieth-century science makemy spirit soar.August 21, 1997: Southeast Asian markets are collapsing before our eyes. Thailand admitted today it had borrowed $23 billion in an unsuccessful attempt toavoid devaluing its currency. Thailand owes a total of $89 billion to foreigners,$40 billion of which comes due within the next year. Indonesia, Malaysia, andthe Philippines are in trouble, too. Stocks are toppling, interest rates are soaring, and outside money is fleeing. Malaysian leader Mahathir Mohamed saysit’s all because Jews are trying to keep Muslims poor.I have just come from consulting my medical man, for I can no longersleep. He said my pulse is high and my nerves are highly strung, but that otherwise I exhibited to him no alarming symptoms. He prescribed a regimen ofvigorous exercise.That night, I manage two or three hours of sleep. A nightmare lays holdof me. I feel that I am in bed and asleep . . . and I feel also that somebody iscoming close to me, looking at me, touching me, getting onto my bed, kneeling on my chest, taking my neck between his hands and squeezing it with allhis might to strangle me. I struggle, bound by that terrible powerlessness thatparalyzes us in our dreams. Then suddenly, I wake up, shaken and bathed inperspiration.October 15, 1997: I have made a complete recovery. The Microsoft shares I purchased the day after the “irrational exuberance” speech are up 73 percent.
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October 20, 1997: I turn on the news and learn that the Justice Department isaccusing Microsoft of violating a court antitrust order. How strange. Microsoft has done more than any company to bring the computer revolution toconsumers. Is success now suspect?About 10 o’clock that evening I go up to my room. As soon as I have entered, I lock and bolt the door. I am frightened—of what?October 27, 1997: A rolling panic that began in Hong Kong last week has engulfed every stock market in the world. In the United States, exchanges haltedtrading today after the Dow plunged 550 points. The value investor David Dreman said, “Investors finally realize the market is overpriced.”3October 28, 1997: I look up from my desk in the New York City offices ofBloomberg News. Ken Kohn, the New York bureau chief, sitting opposite me,is cackling. “Victor Niederhoffer went under!” he says.April 30, 1998: The shadow has passed. Jeremy Siegel, the Wharton financeprofessor, just introduced an expanded edition of his Stocks for the Long Run,showing that stocks have averaged an annual return of 7 percent after inflation for the past two centuries, twice the return on bonds.4 The Dow has risen28 percent since that terrible Monday last October, and my Microsoft sharesare up 40 percent. I feel cured.August 31, 1998: In one month, the world has fallen into chaos. More than 250people were killed when terrorists simultaneously bombed our embassies inKenya and Tanzania. The Saudi terrorist Osama bin Laden said strikes againstthe United States would continue “from everywhere.” The next day, PresidentClinton ordered a retaliatory strike against bin Laden in Afghanistan and anerve gas factory in Sudan—but the strike missed bin Laden, and Sudan insists the factory did not make nerve gas at all, just drugs. People are calling ourcounterattacks a terrible instance of life imitating art. Just three days earlier,Clinton admitted on television that he had had an “inappropriate relationship”with Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern. A grand jury is investigatingwhether he lied about it under oath. A new Hollywood hit, Wag the Dog, released just before the attacks, features a U.S. president who declares war to divert attention from a brewing sex scandal.On top of everything else, Russia devalued its currency last week and defaulted on its debt. In an attempt to clear my mind with fresh air, I went for awalk in Central Park. I turned into a shady path in a little-visited area. A sudden shiver of agony ran through me, and I hastened my steps, frightened without reason. Suddenly it seemed as if I were being followed, that somebody waswalking at my heels, close, quite close to me, near enough to touch me. I
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turned round suddenly, but I was alone. I returned home to find the Dow average had closed down 512 points. In four days, it has lost 12 percent. All themajor indexes are down for the year.September 28, 1998: Some very big hedge funds have lost billions in Augustand September. One fund, Long-Term Capital Management, had to be bailedout for $3.6 billion by 14 banks after losing all but $400 million of what hadbeen $4.8 billion in net assets. Fear was rampant that the financial systemmight collapse under the strain if Long-Term failed to meet its obligations.Quantum, Omega, and Tiger suffered stiff losses. The public is scared and isdumping bank stocks. Goldman Sachs, the king of Wall Street, had to cancelits scheduled initial public offering today. Congress is howling to regulatehedge funds. I feel the frightening presence of my nightmares lurking outside my window almost every evening now. It seems to be laughing wickedly.I went to a dinner at New York University tonight to hear a speech byArthur Levitt, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).Levitt said managers are putting out hocus-pocus financial statements with thecomplicity of their auditors to pump up market capitalization and increase thevalue of their options. He warned executives to put their houses in order. Nomore inflated write-offs for restructuring charges, future operating expenses,and “in-process research” to make future earnings look better. No more stashing profits in the cookie jar for a rainy day. No more booking sales before delivery takes place. No more quibbling over how big a lie has to be before it is“material” under Generally Accepted Accounting Principles.5The lawyers and accountants in the room put down their forks andstarted taking notes.I suddenly felt a chill in the room. An unearthly voice seemed to be laughing, and I could not escape the feeling that he was mocking Levitt.May 5, 1999: Was it really a case of Wag the Dog? The U.S. government said itwouldn’t contest a lawsuit for damages filed by the Saudi owner of the drugfactory we bombed in Sudan last August. I sense the shadow is laughing.August 2, 1999: Huge accounting frauds are coming to light every week.Bankers Trust has paid $63 million in fines for stealing dormant client fundsto cover general expenses. Cendant, Livent, McKesson, Rite Aid, and Sunbeamare embroiled in scandals. Carol J. Loomis, writing in Fortune about the SECcrackdown, said the cascade of cases suggests “great expanses of accountingrot, just waiting to be revealed.” She noted that when the Wall Street Journalpublished a front-page story in 1994 about how Jack Welch “smoothed” earnings at General Electric with the “creative use of restructuring charges and
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reserves,” the company got calls from other corporations saying, “Well, this iswhat companies do. Why is this a front-page story?”Eventually, “Someone may go to jail,”6 she wrote. I shivered. The nightmare presence seemed to smile and grow larger as though he somehowgained strength from these scandals, as bacteria thrive in dirt and darkness.November 22, 1999: My copy of Fortune arrived in the mail today. I start idlyreading a transcript of speeches that Warren Buffett made in July and September at small but influential private gatherings of technology entrepreneurs andventure capitalists. A shadow seems to fill the room, and I shiver. The great investor said that had he been at Kitty Hawk in 1903, he would have shot downOrville Wright as a service to capitalists. “There were about 300 aircraft manufacturers in 1919–1939. Only a handful are breathing today,” Buffett said.7 Ishe mad? Or am I mad? Has not air transport vastly improved travel and commerce? Is not aerospace the largest U.S. export industry? Yet here was themost admired capitalist in the world, telling people that investing in innovativeindustries does not pay off.Buffett did not say if he had considered the impact of dividends, mergers,acquisitions, or name changes. He did not say whether the early aircraft makers had gone bankrupt. Nor did he provide numbers on returns or variabilitiesto support his assertion that the aerospace industry was a bad investment. Hehad selected an industry that may very well have yielded poor returns. Anystudent of market history knows that instances of success and failure can befound in accord with any untested assertion. But many other industrieslooked just as promising in 1903—pharmaceuticals, tabulating machines,and packaged foods, to name a few—that have matured to yield the 1,500,000percent-a-century returns that the typical investment has averaged since then.I am amazed to read that Buffett’s remarks drew tremendous applauseand admiration. Jeffrey Bezos, founder of amazon.com, is insisting thatall his executives study the speech. Lenin is supposed to have once said,“We will all live to see the day that capitalists swing by our ropes from hightrees.” A member of the audience, doubtless with lips closed, shouted out,“Who will sell us the rope?” Lenin promptly answered, “The capitalists willsell it to us.”Who but Lenin himself could have predicted that such a baseless claim,so at odds with the dynamic and creative nature of the enterprise system,could have been greeted with such acclaim at conferences on the marvels oftechnology?Mary Buffett’s book, Buffettology, says Buffett views stocks as groceries,or perhaps a glorified type of annuity, to be bought only when available at
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discount.8 He refuses to invest in growth stocks such as technology issues because he does not understand them. Instead of taking the time to learn and beable to discern what is worthwhile about the new, Buffett rejects innovation.He is like those people who live in the hills hoarding goods necessary for survival, precious metals for barter, and guns to fight off any desperate survivorsof the apocalypse they are convinced is inevitable.The antidote to this negativism is a belief in the creative power of individuals to improve their situations through mutually beneficial exchange. Thisbelief, combined with a belief in the continuing wonders of technology andinnovation, leads to viewing stocks as an excellent investment.Preparations for millennial celebrations are beginning all over, yet I cannot get Buffett’s odd anecdotes and the puzzling hatred of the dynamic natureof the enterprise system out of my mind.I went to bed and fell asleep, only to be roused two hours later by a terrible shock. Imagine a sleeping man who wakes up with a knife in his chest,gurgling in his throat, covered with blood, no longer able to breathe, a manwho realizes he is going to die and does not understand why it is happening—there you have it. Oh! Who can understand my horrible agony? I must escapethese fatalist obsessions.December 31, 1999: It’s bonus time on Wall Street, and the rewards are worthyof maharajahs. Morgan Stanley’s Internet analyst, Mary Meeker, will make$15 million, Bloomberg News reported. Jack Grubman, a Salomon Smith Barney telecommunications analyst, will probably receive $10 million. At least5,000 bankers, analysts, and traders will take home $1 million.9The value of Bill Gates’ Microsoft shares topped $100 billion this year;more, as Bloomberg’s Brian Rooney noted, than the gross domestic productof Greece. If Microsoft stock continues to rise 59 percent a year, as it hasfor the last decade, Rooney said, Bill’s fortune will surpass U.S GDPby 2010.10Every business related to stocks is thriving this year. Assets in Fidelity Investment’s mutual funds have reached a record $1 trillion, and investmentbanks have raised almost $24 billion for Internet companies. The Nasdaq hasrisen 51 percent from October 19 through today.It’s all fine, very fine. Yet I keep thinking of Albert Jay Nock’s descriptionin Memoirs of a Superfluous Man of the turn of the nineteenth century.Nock quoted a passage from Turgenev’s Clara Militch to describe the spirit ofthe time:He dreamed that he was in a rich manor-house, of which he was the owner. He hadlately bought both the house and the estate attached to it. And he kept thinking,
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“It’s nice, very nice now, but evil is coming!” Beside him moved to and fro a littletiny man, his steward; he kept laughing, bowing, and trying to show Aratov howadmirably everything was arranged in his house and his estate. “This way, pray,this way, pray,” he kept repeating, chuckling at every word; “kindly look how prosperous everything is with you! Look at the horses, what splendid horses!” AndAratov saw a row of immense horses. They were standing in their stalls with theirbacks to him. Their manes and tails were magnificent, but as soon as Aratov wentnear, the horses’ heads turned toward him, and they showed their teeth viciously.“It’s very nice,” Aratov thought, “but evil is coming!” “This way, pray, this way,”the steward repeated again, “pray come into the garden; look, what fine applesyou have.” The apples certainly were fine, red and round, but as soon as Arratovlooked at them they withered and fell. “Evil is coming!” he thought. “And here isthe lake,” lisped the steward. “Isn’t it blue and smooth? And here’s a little boat ofgold—will you get into it?—it floats of itself.” “I won’t get into it,” thought Aratov;“evil is coming!” but for all that he got into the boat. At the bottom lay huddled upa little creature like a monkey; it was holding in its paws a glass full of a dark liquid. “Pray don’t be uneasy,” the steward shouted from the bank. “It’s of no consequence. It’s death. Good luck to you!”
“For the great majority, the last decade of the century seemed to offerevery encouragement to complacent hopefulness,” Nock wrote. “All the institutional voices of society were blended to form the sycophantic reassurancesof Aratov’s steward.”11January 5, 1999: I’ve been reading a deeply unsettling theory proposed by theevolutionist Richard Dawkins. He thinks that a new replicating entity has recently emerged on earth. This entity is still in its infancy, but has alreadyachieved an evolutionary rate far ahead of traditional genes. He calls this newentity a meme:Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways ofmaking pots, or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in thegene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagatethemselves by leaping from brain to brain in a process which, in the broad sense,can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passesit on to his colleagues and students. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself.12
A fertile meme acts like a parasite in the brain, turning it into a vehicle forthe meme’s propagation just as a virus takes control of the genetic mechanism of its host cell. A meme, although Dawkins says it rhymes with “dream,”is no mere ethereal concept. A meme that takes hold actually manifests itselfphysically, as it modifies the nervous systems of millions of individuals.
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For more than three billion years, DNA was the only self-replicatingmechanism. Now, the new replicators, memes, are taking over and initiatingtheir own kind of evolution. As was the case with genes, selection will favorthe memes that exploit the environment to their own advantage.I can scarce believe that a mere thought can yield such awesome power.The meme concept has me altogether perturbed.Seeking to escape my troubled reflections, I started leafing through “TheHorla,” a short story by de Maupassant. Suddenly I came across a passage relating the narrator’s conversation with a monk:Do we see the hundred-thousandth part of what exists? Look here; there is thewind, which is the strongest force in nature. It knocks down men, and blowsdown buildings, uproots trees, raises the sea into mountains of water, destroyscliffs and casts great ships on to the breakers; it kills, it whistles, it sighs, it roars.But have you ever seen it, and can you see it? Yet it exists for all that.
January 6, 2000: I am not mad. I have seen . . . I have seen . . . I have seen it!After closing the millennium at a record high, the Nasdaq 100 has dropped 12percent in the past three days. That fiber-optics stock everyone has been making so much money on, JDS Uniphase, fell 20 percent. Rumors have it thatGeorge Soros’ hedge funds are dumping huge holdings of Nasdaq stocks.February 17, 2000: The meme is coming at me from all sides. I hear it, I see iteverywhere. It came out of the mouth of Greenspan while I was watching histwice-yearly speech on the state of the economy to the House Banking Committee. First he said the economy was better than he had seen in half a century. But then he proceeded to float an incredible theory that overturned anaxiom as fundamental to economics as gravity is to physics. He claimed thatdemand created by market wealth threatened to outstrip the supply of goodsbecause stocks are too high:Without doubt, the synergies of the microprocessor, laser, fiber-optic glass, andsatellite technologies have brought quantum advances in information availability.These advances, in turn, have dramatically decreased business operational uncertainties and risk premiums and, thereby, have engendered major cost reductionsand productivity advances. There seems little question that further major advances lie ahead.. . .The problem is that the pickup in productivity tends to create even greater increasesin aggregate demand than in potential aggregate supply [Emphasis added]. This occurs principally because a rise in structural productivity growth has its counterpart in higher expectations for long-term corporate earnings. This, in turn, not
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only spurs business investment but also increases stock prices and the marketvalue of assets held by households, creating additional purchasing power forwhich no additional goods or services have yet been produced. . . . [S]o long as thelevels of consumption and investment are sensitive to asset values, equity valuesincreasing at a pace faster than income, other things equal, will induce a rise inoverall demand in excess of potential supply. But that situation cannot persistwithout limit because the supply safety valves are themselves limited.. . . [T]he necessary alignment of the growth of aggregate demand with thegrowth of potential aggregate supply may well depend on restraint on domesticdemand, which continues to be buoyed by the lagged effects of increases in stockmarket valuations.
Shaken and in need of an independent opinion, I e-mailed Richard Zeckhauser, professor of political economy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy Schoolof Government. Zeckhauser’s work examines possibilities for the democratic,decentralized allocation of resources in accordance with the preferences of thecitizenry. He wrote back:Neither supply nor demand can be out of line for long. Shortages are always ashort-term phenomenon unless the government interferes and fixes prices. Thereason, of course, is that price adjusts to equate supply and demand.I think that Greenspan would be worried about a supply shortage because hedoes not like the consequence of a temporary shortage; namely he does not like itwhen prices rise to bring about an equilibrium. But, of course, this is a healthy response, because this is the only way to bring out the resources that will produceadditional supply. But if you hate inflation above all else, you will not like thisresponse.This could be a little like hating the swollen, red state of an infection. But ofcourse, the infection is really just our white blood cells fighting off some foreignagent. We are better off with these fighters, despite their side effects, than wewould be without them. So, I would say that the price system does a good job ofdealing with supply inadequacies, but not without some dislocation in prices.
One of the elementary, inviolate principles of economics is that if supplyis scarce, prices for that good or service will rise until demand for it falls. Thisnatural equilibrium is based on rational expectations, and requires no interference from government. In the eighteenth century, Adam Smith wrote ofan invisible hand. In our day, Heyne observed in his classic text, The EconomicWay of Thinking, “People want more or less of a good as the cost those peoplemust pay decreases or increases.”Now I know. I can divine. The reign of rational thought is over. Woe to us!It has come. I have heard . . . the Meme . . . it is here . . . the Meme!
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March 1, 2000: Now the Meme is replicating and mutating. I saw it today inBerkshire Hathaway’s annual report. Buffett again! “Equity investors currently seem wildly optimistic in their expectations about future returns.”Greenspan again! Today, the Fed released verbatim transcript of its 1994meetings. Never before had meeting transcripts been released to the public.The Fed had decided in 1994 to release them with a five-year lag.The transcripts show that Greenspan and his cohorts had been pattingthemselves on the back for arresting a possible stock market bubble. “I thinkwe partially broke the back of an emerging speculation in equities,” Greenspantold members of the Fed’s policy-making body, the Federal Open Market Committee, in a February 1994 conference call. “As we look back on this, I suspectthat there was a significant overshoot in the market. We pricked that bubble.”The horror! When did the stock market become the Fed’s business?Greenspan repeated his comment the following month, according to thetranscript of the March 22, 1994, FOMC meeting. “When we moved on February 4th, [1994], I think our expectation was that we would prick the bubble inthe equity markets,” Greenspan told the committee members. (In the previous year, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had risen 18 percent—to 3967.)Ah, I can imagine the scene. The Fed governors, seated at the long polished table in grand chairs, served on china by obsequious waiters, laughinggenially at the chairman’s jokes, grinning at their victory over the market. Itmakes me think of the old men who used to sit in armchairs at the windowsof Manhattan’s grand clubs, murmuring with disapproval at the sight of astray Jew walking along Fifth Avenue.The federal funds rate increases over the past eight months with no inflation in sight—all is clear now! The old men at the Fed do not like to see ordinary people making money in the stock market. They do not like the youngentrepreneurs making money in new technology ventures. They especially donot like the day traders, who are said to make hundreds of thousands in a daywithout even knowing the business of the stocks they trade. The old menwant investors to have graduated from the schools that they did and to looklike them. An elitist meme has taken over a country where everyone shouldhave equal opportunity to profit from an investment in capitalism. AlexanderPope once said: “Most old men are like old trees. Past bearing themselves,they will suffer no young plants to flourish beneath them.”Despite the grotesque servility with which the media treat the old men,they are only reincarnations of the senex amans, that comic character who appears throughout the centuries in literature and opera, the old man who tries towin the young girl for himself. In The Canterbury Tales, he is the 60-year-oldbachelor January who insists on marrying a girl who is not more than 20, only
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to be cuckolded by a lusty young rival. In Rossini’s Barber of Seville, Dr. Bartolopants after his young ward, Rosina. In Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, old Marcellina tries to snare young, handsome Figaro by lending him money. Victorians appreciated the senex amans theme so much that Gilbert and Sullivan usedit in Iolanthe, The Mikado, H.M.S. Pinafore, and The Pirates of Penzance.I went to bed and had a terrible nightmare. I felt somebody sucking mylife out—sucking it out of my neck as a leech would suck blood. Then he gotup, satiated, and I woke up, so beaten, crushed, and annihilated that I couldnot move. Have I lost my reason? What has happened? What I saw is sostrange that my mind wanders when I think of it!March 14, 2000: The Meme, moving with incredible speed now, has reachedthe White House and London. President Bill Clinton and Prime MinisterTony Blair called for immediate public access to raw genetic data collected byprivate companies. “Our genome belongs to every member of the humanrace,’’ Clinton said. “We must ensure that the profits of human genetic research are measured not in dollars but in the betterment of human life.’’Craig Venter, whose company, Celera, was on the verge of beating a government team in a race to map the human genome, commented, “Being a business seems to be an awful thing today.” The Amex Biotech Index plunged 13percent today.March 21, 2000: I can only wait, paralyzed, powerless. I feel the Meme’s presence nearby, looming over me, looking at me, dominating me. The Fed raisedinterest rates today to 6 percent from 5.75 percent, claiming it “remains concerned that increases in demand will continue to exceed the growth in potential supply, which could foster inflationary imbalances that would underminethe economy’s record expansion.”April 4, 2000: Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson ruled last night that Microsoftviolated antitrust law. The Nasdaq, synonymous with technology, lost 349points yesterday in advance of the decision, and dived 575 points this morningbefore miraculously wafting up to close at 4148, down 75.A new blockbuster has hit bookstore shelves: Irrational Exuberance, byRobert Shiller, the Yale professor who invented the contagious phrase andpassed it to the Fed chairman back in 1996.13April 28, 2000: Nobody thinks there will be any more miraculous levitations inthe Nasdaq. Stanley Druckenmiller resigned from the Soros organizationtoday, saying he lost billions on technology stocks. “I never thought the Nasdaq would drop 35 percent in 15 days,” he said. Yet, in the three terrible weeksleading up to the April 15 tax deadline, that is exactly what happened.
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May 16, 2000: The Fed raised interest rates yet again today, to 6.5 percent.Does the Meme want to destroy all?August 31, 2000: The first year of the new era so happily welcomed is not evenover, but everything has changed to fear and viciousness. Rising interest rateshave choked off capital spending. Hundreds of thousands of entrepreneursand workers are out of work.An enveloping torpor has set in everywhere from corporate boardroomplanning sessions to ordinary investors’ kitchen-table discussions.The Meme is ubiquitous now. Reporters are reaching into their Rolodexesto find “experts” whose chronic pessimism had discredited them in the 1990s.The leader of the claque is Alan Abelson, the star columnist at America’s mostinfluential financial weekly, Barron’s. Two new stars were elevated to the pantheon: David Tice of the short-selling Prudent Bear Fund and Robert Shiller,whose thoughts on “irrational exuberance,” high price/earnings ratios, andgeneral bearishness are in much demand on the TV networks.December 6, 2000: The Meme is spreading like a viral pandemic. More andmore are being infected. The big shoes of the Fed chairman are higher off theground than the Nasdaq, already down 50 percent from its Y2K high. Theonly thing lower than the Nasdaq is the record of the New York Knicks, whosecenter fights with his own teammates when he does not get the ball. AlanGreenspan and Patrick Ewing have too much hubris for their positions. Theycould switch roles, and everyone would benefit.December 7, 2000: We send Size 12 basketball shoes to Greenspan and suggestthat he trade places with the big center of the Knicks. We send him The Education of a Speculator as a further gesture of goodwill.January 2, 2001: We receive an e-mail: “I’ve been reading your stock marketcolumn on the Internet, and I liked the one where you said you were going tobuy a googol of Internet stocks on margin. I called my broker from my cellphone. I tried to say, ‘Buy me such-and-such stocks.’ But instead of this Ishouted—I did not say, but I shouted—in such a loud voice that all thepassers-by turned around: ‘JUST . . . SELL . . . EVERYTHING!’ ”January 3, 2001: The Nasdaq rises 324 points. The reader who sold everythingis lost! Like a pestilence, the Meme relentlessly pursues both those in its pathand those who flee from it. No one is safe.February 7, 2001: A box and a letter arrive from the Fed. “Thank you very muchfor sending the sneakers to Chairman Greenspan. However, it is against ourethics policy to accept gifts, and we are accordingly returning them here