Author: A.T.

Are you registered to vote today? If not, choose one:

[ ] I am not an American citizen.

[ ] I am too young to vote.

[ ] I am embarrassed.

Sorry: there are no other choices.

Seriously. People have laid down their lives to win the right to vote. Yet some of my friends don’t register for fear the might be called to jury duty?

Don’t leave democracy up to someone else. That person might not be as nice as you. It’s an old, old notion, but ultimately true: If we take our freedom and prosperity for granted, we will surely lose them.

Register! In some states, you can do it right on the spot, I think. Click here and select your state to find out how to register. Even if it’s too late to be eligible to vote today, taking care of this now, while you think of it, will give you a head start on next year.

Vote! If you have no idea whom you favor in an off-year like this, check the editorial page of a newspaper you respect. Or just vote straight Democrat (he grinned).

Peter Kronenberg: “Wearing a T-shirt will not prevent you from getting sick. This is an old wives tale. You don’t catch a virus just because you’re cold. People get sick more in the winter because they are stuck indoors with other sick people.”

I can’t speak to the science of it, only the sinus. There’s something to what those old wives say. Plus, as I’ve explained, wearing a T-shirt will make you rich.

Stephen Gilbert: “Here’s a web site which allows access to the reports of charities to enable donors to judge them better: http://www.guidestar.org/index.html .”

Outstanding. And even more so: the new Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund web site. I’ve long used and recommended Fidelity’s Charitable Gift Fund. It’s the poor man’s way to set up a charitable foundation — the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and now Your Foundation. Or close to it.

You can fund it with cash or (better) appreciated-securities-held-more-than-a-year and get your full tax deduction when you do. Your personal gift fund will grow until you decide to “grant” pieces of it, in chunks of $250 and up, to the accredited charities of your choice.

I used to have to mail or fax in my grant instructions. Now, with this newly opened web site, it’s even easier. I can go on-line, see the exact value of my account, and, best of all, make grants without ever having to crack a pen (my handwriting has become vestigial) or mail or fax anything (Sloth is my muse). When making grants to groups you’ve given to in the past, you just point and shoot.

It’s not too late to establish such a fund for 1999, and an excellent way to give.

• You get the tax deduction this year, avoiding whatever capital gains tax you would have otherwise had to pay if you had first sold your shares and then given the money.

• If this was a great year for you, you can give a lot to the Gift Fund, without passing it all through to your favorite charities. That lets you level things out, so you can continue to give even in years when you’ve not done well. This is important, because, trust me, if you give a charity $5,000 this year — ten times what you normally do — they will totally forget you are basically a $500-a-year donor who happened to have a great 1999, and will ever after expect at least $5,000 a year.

• Best of all, you can use it to make small gifts. To give $250 or $500 of stock would have been ridiculous, with all the paperwork, and with the brokerage commissions the charity would have to pay to sell it. But to give $10,000 or $25,000 worth of stock, once, to the Fidelity Gift Fund, in a single efficient transaction, and then go to the web site every time you want to make a $250 or $500 grant — well, that does make sense.

Vanguard now offers a similar gift fund, so you may want to check that out, too. But don’t let indecision paralyze you: just choose one or the other and get going.

Long-time readers of this column know I have a stake in Quickbrowse.com, and have enjoyed watching it develop. It’s still at an early stage, but last week’s Christian Science Monitor OnLine compared it, lightheartedly, with the invention of the light bulb. And quite a few of you use one of its features — Q-Page — to get this column delivered every weekday morning. (Sorry about Monday, by the way. I thought I had posted a sentence saying my weekend had been “too eventful to get a column done.” But apparently, it had been too eventful even for me to click the right button to post that sentence.)

Anyway, today I offer the early adopters among you the world’s very first look at, and free use of, QBFI — Quickbrowse for Investors.

I could explain why this is so great, but just go see for yourself.

It’s a lot more intuitive than Quickbrowse has been (we’re fixing that). And although you’ll find it’s still not completely ready for prime time, it does work — or should anyway. If there are a few stocks you particularly like to follow, enter their symbols separated by commas (amzn,cool,rosi) and then include messages among the other things you select, like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal (for which you must first have passwords) . . . and the point is, you can set it up so that every morning there’s an e-mail waiting for you with all the latest messages on your stocks, and all the headlines from the papers, and an easy way to “browse” through it all.

If you’re not an early adopter, wait a while until we have all this running like a Swatch. But it can’t hurt to take a Quick look.

Amazon reported a spectacular quarter after the market close Wednesday, losing just $197 million, which was better than analysts expected.

Of course, companies almost always do better than analysts expect, because analysts have somehow not noticed that the game is all about beating expectations, and so expectations are purposely “guided” low and then — wham! — beaten . . . just as everyone but the analysts expected.

(Once in a while expectations have to be lowered in mid-quarter in order to set this up, in which case the reporting company’s results will be said to have “exceeded lowered expectations.”)

But you can’t argue with success. By losing only $197 million this quarter, Amazon beat expectations. And by more than quadrupling the loss over the same period last year, it showed that losses could be ramped up even faster than sales, which merely doubled.

There’s no disputing this is bang-up performance. Amazon beat expectations! Yet again!

Unaccountably, the stock actually dropped $5 on the news.

Why so cheap?

At this level, Amazon is valued at barely double FedEx. But all FedEx does is make a half-billion-dollar profit each year delivering the stuff Amazon sells at a loss. Anybody could do that. It’s just a matter of buying a few hundred jets and a few thousand vans, hiring 125,000 employees, and setting up some systems. But how many people can set up a web site to sell stuff?

Almost nobody, which is why you see so few retailers on the web. Barely a thousand new ones debut each day.

One outfit that’s managed to do so: Outpost.com, which claims to sell 160,000 different products, and which has a joint venture with Tweeter.com. (Tweeter got its start when my buddy Sandy Bloomberg, then maybe 20, started a little stereo store in Cambridge or Boston someplace back when we were all in bell bottoms — and certainly before any of us wore undershirts — and now look at him!)

I signed on to Tweeter’s Outpost last night around eleven thirty and bought a 13-inch am/fm alarm-clock-enabled cable-ready remote-controlled Panasonic color TV/VCR combination for $259, including free overnight shipping. Seriously: it has every one of those functions, and even pre-sets for the radio — plus a sleep timer that shuts off the TV when it hears you snore. (At least I think that’s how it works.)

And here is my point:

The box arrived (Airborne, not FedEx) . . . this morning.

Are you listening? I ordered it shortly before midnight last night. It arrived this morning!

I’m not saying this is typical of Outpost; I don’t know. It’s the first thing I’ve ever ordered from them. But how much better than this can Amazon do? Is AMZN really worth fifty times as much as Outpost? As I’ve said all along, if everything goes right for Amazon, you can make a case for its one day being one of the most valuable companies on the planet. But it’s already valued at more than FedEx, United Airlines, and the New York Times Company — plus 10 Outpost.coms — combined. And what if it turns out others can compete?

(Full disclosure: I have long been short AMZN and long been long FDX; I have no position in COOL or TWTR; I am a happy AMZN customer and wish them well.)

It won’t work on a Macintosh yet . . . and it went a lot better for me with Internet Explorer than with AOL 5.0 . . . and I have to assume that by tomorrow 20 million people will have signed up for this and it will grind to some kind of halt . . .but this actually, actually works!

Forget 5 cents a minute. That’s a nickel too much.

Forget free calls where you have to listen to commercials first (though it’s great when you don’t happen to have a quarter at a payphone — 800-FREEWAY).

This is totally FREE phone service from your computer to any real phone anywhere in the U.S. (Soon, with luck, anywhere on the planet.

At the suggestion of the Remarkable Rogowsky’s — brothers and long-time friends whose familiar-sounding motto is Live Free or Die! — I went to dialpad.com and, without ever giving a credit card or having to guess what kind of modem I have (how should I know what kind of modem I have?), I was actually making free calls minutes later.

Would I make important calls with this service? No. The sound quality isn’t perfect (try lowering dialpad.com’s mike level) — and who knows what other weird things might happen. But for routine calls? It’s fine. Or at least it has been today. By tomorrow, as I say, there will probably have 20 million users attempting to jabber nonstop. The entire Internet will collapse. But right now — well, right now I have to go make some more calls.

It’s getting cold!

Remember how your mother used to tell you to wear an undershirt? I am here to tell you she was right.

There are two strong economic reasons for this.

First, you will save considerably on dry-cleaning. Those shirts you could wear only once before they got rank? Don’t tell anyone, but I have been wearing this same oxford blue button-down shirt for 23 days now. To dinners, to speeches, on planes, on trains, to a Ricky Martin concert. And it’s still fresh. OK, OK, that’s an exaggeration. But say that with an undershirt you can get two days out of a shirt instead of one. Suddenly, your dry-cleaning bill is cut in half, at least for shirts — maybe $250 a year. And you need fewer shirts in your shirt inventory. And the shirts you do buy will probably last longer, because dry-cleaning can’t be good for shirts. So call it $350, all in.

Second, you won’t get sick this winter. Or at least not as often or severely. I know you’re major macho and YOU don’t get colds or the flu, and when you do, they don’t get YOU down. But we both know that’s not true. Being healthy will save on cold medicine and that awful Nyquil and, most importantly, the poor financial decisions made in the fog of too little sleep (how can you sleep when you can’t breathe?) and too much Pseudoephedrine Hydrochloride. You think Warren Buffett goes around with a head full of Chlorpheniramine Maleate? No, he wears undershirts!

So we’re talking big money here. (And yes, I wore this shirt to a Ricky Martin concert. What was so cool, if you ask me — someone to whom it would never ordinarily occur to go to a Ricky Martin concert — is that Charles and I were taken by the editor of the Wall Street Journal. And his girlfriend, who works with People. And these weren’t some amazing comp seats, as I had assumed they would be — free seats from Ricky’s PR people, so they figured, oh, well, what the heck, why not go. No! They bought these seats! From a scalper! For a breathtaking price! And not at the last minute — months in advance. Move over Rolling Stone! Anyway, there we were, me in my shirt, crumpled bits of napkin stuffed in my ears, sitting up in the bleachers someplace, directly in front of two screaming little girls — Ricky! Riiiiiiiicky!!! — who I assumed were 13 or 14 until we turned around to face them directly and realized they were, like, so much younger. “How old are you guys?” asked the editor of the Wall Street Journal, who has a couple of post-college daughters of his own. “I’m nine,” said one. “Ten,” said the other. On average, we were 40. But you should have seen us dance. And still my shirt was fine.)

Anyway, we’re talking big money here, with these shirts. And it’s the money, really, not your health, that concerns me.

But I do care how you look, so let’s nail this down. We are talking 100% combed cotton, the fabric of our lives. We are obviously not talking tank top or Street Car style, unless you can really, really pull it off. (And even if you can, those aren’t warm enough.) And we are obviously talking crew-neck, not V-neck, because we’re trying to keep you warm. Charles says that even without a tie this is a perfectly good look . . . it’s fine to see that little triangle of white cotton — and that settles that. So what I would do if I were you is trot down to Saks Fifth Avenue, if there’s one near you, and buy a three-pack of their classic white T-shirts.* If you then decide you can find some Calvin Kleins or Fruit of the Looms that feel as good and fit as well for less money, fine. But start with these . . . change them every day (for crying out loud — and don’t forget the Right Guard and your breath mints) . . . and invest your dry-cleaning, Sudafed savings prudently, but with a sense of humor. Do all this, my son, and you will be healthy, wealthy, and a wise-ass.

(The concert was kind of over my head — I prefer classical — but the energy was irresistible and a couple of the band members with bungee-cords hooked to their belts were, by the end, literally climbing the walls.)

For other health tips, see Healthology.com. Have a nice day.

*I spent an hour trying to make this easier for you, but the Saks e-commerce web site is “coming soon” . . . the 800-number people had no clue . . . the corporate PR department’s recording said no one was available in the middle of a Monday afternoon . . . and pressing O for an operator brought the news that no Operator was available, either. Match that, K-Mart. But the T-shirts are very good.

Oh, please. The only thing more preposterous than this — you have doubtless seen some discussion of a book by this name (by bright people! how could they?!) — is Donald Trump for President. I mean, please.

Sure, the Dow will get to 36,000 — some day. If it rose 5% a year from today’s 10,000, it would get there in 26 years. (That’s how long it took the Dow to get from 1,000 to 3,600.) But Dow 36,000 anytime soon? I sure hope not! As our friends the Japanese would attest, a financial “bubble” is fun only for those lucky enough to get out at the top — and then move to a country not gripped by the hangover.

Is it possible, one wonders, for the Dow to climb so slowly? At just 5% a year?

I wouldn’t be amazed to see something like that happen, albeit with large ups and downs along the way. Remember, for starters, that that’s 5% on top of dividends. (Quaintly, some of the Dow stocks actually do still pay dividends.) So the total return if the Dow were climbing 5% a year might be more like 7%.

For many decades, the Dow provided a total return of more like 9% or even 10%. So even 7% would be pretty lame. But remember, also, the concept of “regression to the mean.” The fact that the Dow — up from 777 in 1982 to 10,000 today — has grown at 16% a year, compounded, may mean this will go on forever. Except a lot of that was achieved as interest rates fell. Long-term Treasuries that yielded close to 15% in 1982 now yield more like 6%. How much lower can yields go? Not below 0% I think — and maybe not even that low in a thriving economy.

So, far from above-normal growth continuing, because we’ve had it so long, we might actually be in for a stretch of below-normal growth, as things even out, regressing to the mean. (That’s mean as in average, not mean as in nasty, though we could have a few nasty moments along the way.)

The Dow first touched 1,000 in 1966 — a heady time for stocks — and first touched 3,600 about 26 years later, in 1993. Then it tripled these past 6 years

(I know: if George Bush and Bob Dole had been in the White House it would have quintupled and we would have added 40 million new jobs instead of just 20 million — and not only would no American soldiers have died in Kosovo, seven would have come back from the dead. But still, it’s been a pretty good run for Clinton/Gore.)

Technology may be lofting the world onto a steeper prosperity curve. And decades’ more experience at the art of global economic management may have improved central banker skills. The traditional 9% (including dividends) may be old news, with a higher number perhaps expected going forward. (Or perhaps not.) But the 16% and 20% annual returns we’ve been seeing . . . well, these are not sustainable.

Dow 36,000 is the kind of book title that lulls sensible people into doing foolish things.

Voila! Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, by Charles Mackay.

The truth is, having been written in 1841, and in England, it does not read like John Kenneth Galbraith. Apart from the odd spellings, there are loads of references I do not get — any more than a reader would have heard of Jerry Springer 160 years from now. Or Pokemon.

But the preface is quite short, and there is no harm in skipping straight through to the tulips.

Indeed, that’s what I’d suggest. Take a minute or two to read the preface, to meet Mackay, then jump to the tulips. Once you’re hooked, read the other two — the Mississippi Scheme and the South-Sea Bubble.

Missing from all this (97 pages in book form) are the final 627 pages. You would think they would be wonderful — how could tales of alchemists and necromancers not be wonderful? — but really they are more like lists of alchemists and necromancers. Trust me. Especially as regards money and economics, the sections I’ve posted are the ones you want to read. (For the complete book, also free, see Project Gutenberg.)

Yesterday I lauded a book called Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. Tomorrow I will post the highlights for you to read at your leisure. Today let’s talk about tulips. Are tech stocks today’s tulip bulbs?

No — for the simple reason that tulips serve no enriching economic purpose, whereas an invention like the wheel or electricity or the Internet does. Tulips never had any chance to improve the world economy. The Internet is improving it profoundly.

So in that sense, the craze for Internet-related stocks is terrific. It’s great — for consumers — that capital is so readily available to build this amazing new world. Whether it will be great for most investors taking the plunge at these levels I tend to doubt. Did the inventor of the wheel get so terribly rich? Did investors in the early automobile companies — or the later ones, for that matter — get so terribly rich?

Over the long run, it’s likely that only a few of the hot companies that have been bid into the billions will prove to have been bargains. (A larger group will prove to have been great buys at their first-round venture valuations, and at their insider IPO prices — but even that group will be small compared with the group that will have fallen by the wayside.)

What’s worrisome about today’s mania, to the extent it is a mania, is how not long-run much of the investing is.

Reader Aron Roberts sent me an excerpt of a speech by Vanguard’s John Brennan last Friday, “in which,” Aron writes, “he cited some amazing figures that would not appear to be all that far removed from the [tulip] frenzy.”

To wit:

“Significant numbers of individual investors have turned from long-term investing to trading. Their horizons have shortened from decades to days. Consider that the average share of Amazon.com is held for seven trading days before being sold to someone else. The average holding period for Yahoo! is eight days. For Priceline.com, it is only 72 hours. And these ridiculously short holding periods are not found only in Internet stocks. The average share of Dell Computer changes hands every three-and-one-half months. Shareholders of Microsoft hang on to their issues for about seven months on average — practically an eon in today’s upside-down world. . . . The magazine from which I drew these statistics questioned whether blue chips were becoming poker chips. Last year, 76% of the shares of the average company listed on the New York Stock Exchange turned over. The figure had risen to 82% through May of this year.” — John Brennan

To a certain extent, the faster turnover may be explained by the lower barriers to turnover. In the old days, it cost a fortune to trade 300 shares of stock, both in commissions and taxes. Today, the commissions can be tiny, and the gains are often tax-sheltered within retirement plans. Today, too, it’s just so much easier. The impulse strikes us and — click — we’re in. Click, we’re out.

Crank, the one-armed bandit spins. Crank, it spins again.

When stock in a company with $66 million in earnings is selling at 681 times those earnings (ya-HOO!!!), a lot has to go right. And this is a stock that’s down 25% from its peak. Think of all the high-flying companies that have no earnings to multiply by. Many of them never will.

So is it tulips? No. We’re building a great new, convenient, efficient global economy. But is it a bit tulip-like? Well, sure.

Tomorrow: The book — and Dow 36,000?

I was doing a term paper on chain letters (of all things) at Harvard Business School. I was barely old enough to shave.

My faculty adviser — right off the top of his head — suggested I seek out a volume called Popular Delusions and the Madness of Krauts — published, he said, in 1841. My God, I was impressed. What esoterica! (I was also astonished by the title and surprised to learn that Germans, even back in 1841, were called Krauts — or that anyone would have called them that on a book jacket.)

I subsequently learned that any business professor worth his salt would have had this book at tongue’s tip; and that it had to do with the madness of crowds. But for each of us there has to be that first time we learn of this book, that first reading of it. Perhaps this is yours.

If so [and here I am simply lifting the Foreword to one of the paperback editions that I was subsequently invited to write], you will read of alchemists and crusaders, of witches and haunted houses, of stock speculations and fortune-tellers and, to my mind most wonderfully of all, of tulips. Tulips, in the fourth decade of the seventeenth century in Holland, became the object of such insane and unreasoning desire that a single bulb — about the size and shape of an onion — could fetch a small fortune on any of the several exchanges that had sprung up to trade them. [Not entirely unlike the mania for certain children’s playthings called “Beanie Babies” we saw only last year.] Not to be missed is Mackay’s account of the unfortunate Dutch sailor who, having been sent down to a rich man’s kitchen for breakfast, and having a particular taste for onions, actually consumed one of the priceless bulbs in error.

As with any true classic, once it is read it is hard to imagine not having known of it — and there is the compulsion to recommend it to others. Thus did financier Bernard Baruch, who claimed his study of this book saved him millions, recommend Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds in his charming foreword of October 1932.

“‘Have you ever seen,'” Baruch quoted an unnamed contemporary, “‘in some wood, on a sunny quiet day, a cloud of flying midges — thousands of them — hovering, apparently motionless, in a sunbeam? …Yes? …Well, did you ever see the whole flight — each mite apparently preserving its distance from all others — suddenly move, say three feet, to one side or the other? Well, what made them do that? A breeze? I said a quiet day. But try to recall — did you ever see them move directly back again in the same unison? Well, what made them do that? Great human mass movements are slower of inception but much more effective.'”

Suddenly, as I write this [I was writing it 20 years ago, in 1979], everyone in New York and California, with the rest of the country perhaps to follow, is on roller skates. I certainly would not call this a form of madness, having just purchased two pairs myself — nor, at least as of this writing, a “great human mass movement.” But all of a sudden there they all are — on roller skates. [“Now it’s roller blades,” I noted in a 1992 update to my foreword, “but I have somehow managed to contain myself.]

Baruch quotes Schiller: “‘Anyone taken as an individual is tolerably sensible and reasonable — as a member of a crowd, he at once becomes a blockhead.'” There are lynch mobs and there are crusades; there are runs on banks and there are fires where, if only people hadn’t panicked, they would all have escaped with their lives. There was “the hustle,” not so long ago, where large groups of young people learned to dance in lemminglike unison. (I have never actually seen a lemming, but I suspect that when I do, I will see more than one.) And there was the mass suicide at Jonestown.

The month Baruch wrote his foreword, perhaps not coincidentally, marked the absolute bottom of the stock market crash that had begun three years earlier, in 1929. Wild speculation had driven the Dow Jones Industrial Average to 381 in October of 1929 on the wings of what had been a panic of greed. Three years later it had fallen not to 300 or 250 or 200 or 150 or even 75 but to 41. Unreasoning greed had turned inside out. It had become unreasoning fear.

“I have always thought,” Baruch reflected on this sorry state of affairs, “that if… even in the very presence of dizzily spiralling [stock] prices, we had all continuously repeated, ‘two and two still make four,’ much of the evil might have been averted. Similarly, even in the general moment of gloom in which this foreword is written, when many begin to wonder if declines will never halt, the appropriate abracadabra may be: ‘They always did.'”

In the late 1960s, stock prices again began to spiral dizzily. Market mania. Synergy was the new magic word, and what it meant, in essence, as various corporate presidents and stock promoters explained over and over, was that two and two could, under astute management, equal five. It was alchemy of a sort and enough to drive at least one stock, in two years, from $6 a share to $140. The talk of the town. Not much later it sold for $1.

By late 1974, stocks generally had fallen, slumped, slid, and otherwise eroded in value to depression levels. The crowd had not just left the party — it was stoning the host. Yet had you had the courage, in December of 1974, to buck the crowd — which in a way is what Extraordinary Delusions and the Madness of Crowds is all about, and why so many investment gurus count it a classic — gains of 500 and 1,000 percent over the ensuing three to four years would have been common in your portfolio. [The same was true in 1982, when the Dow Jones average touched 777, and will be true one day again.]

Not that you must be a stock-trader to benefit from the perspective this book provides. Should the government balance its budget? Should the Fed loosen or tighten credit? Read in the very first chapter a tale of money printing and speculation in early eighteenth-century France that should give any deficit spender, any easy-money advocate, severe pause. (Read, too, of the hunchback who supposedly profited handily renting out his hump as a writing table, so frenzied had the speculation become.) Mackay describes Frenchmen “ruining themselves with frantic eagerness.” And then in the second chapter the lunacy spreads to sober England, where, Mackay says, “every fool aspired to be a knave.” If you read no more of this book than the first hundred pages — on money mania — it will be worth many times its purchase. [Save your money! I will be posting this for you, free, on this site.]

But back to chain letters. Perhaps awaiting the invention of the photocopier, or at least carbon paper, they do not seem to have been big in Mackay’s time. They are missing from his pages. But, oh, how they would fit.

In 1935, in Denver, nearly a century after Mackay wrote Popular Delusions (and just a short time after, having nothing to fear but fear itself, the nation panicked and mobbed the banks, forcing many to collapse), someone composed a “send-a-dime” chain letter that promised to make participants rich. Just where all this free money was to come from was not explained. It never is. Nonetheless, in Denver alone, postal volume swelled by some 160,000 pieces of mail a day. The craze spread across the country (and across the Atlantic), jumping in many places from a dime to five dollars and more. The Associated Press reported that Springfield, Missouri, had been turned into “a money-mad maelstrom.” To get in on the action, “society women, waitresses, college students, taxi drivers and hundreds of others jammed downtown streets. Women shoved each other roughly in a bargain-counter rush on the numerous chain headquarters [that had been established] in drugstores and corridors, anywhere there was space.” To skirt postal regulations, and save time, the letters were being passed face to face. By the following evening, AP reported, “sad-faced men and women walked around in a daze . . . seeking vainly for someone to buy their chain letters.” Everybody by now had a letter to sell; no one was left to buy.

Chain letters reappear periodically. Just last year one rose to national prominence — only this time at $100 a crack. At the end of twelve days, the letter asserted, if you sold your letter to two people who sold it to four who sold it to eight, and so on, you would surely have more than $100,000. If everyone participated, everyone would be rich. Where was all this free money to come from? And yet against all logic (not to mention several laws), the “Circle of Gold Memorandum,” as it was called, went whipping through the media/arts communities of Los Angeles, New York, Toronto, and points beyond. Virtually everyone lost his money. It had to be so; it will always be so. And if it is not one madness, it will be another.

Once upon a time there was an emperor with no clothes. For the longest time no one noticed. As you will read in this marvelous book, there have been many naked emperors since. There will doubtless be many more.

A.T.
November 1979
New York City

Tomorrow: Are Internet Stocks Today’s Tulips? (Yes and No)