In the last month, the Dow Jones Industrial Average—a key indicator of U.S. economic health—has dropped more than 20 percent. The world markets are crashing, and pundits are already heralding this as the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression. President George W. Bush (R) and leaders of the Republican and Democratic parties would have you believe that they doing everything they can the head off an impending economic catastrophe.

But let’s step back for a minute and look at how we got here. The reality might be pretty surprising.

In the 1990s, we were riding high on the ‘dot-com boom’. Internet companies, many of which did not have rational business plans, were the darlings of the market. College dropouts could spend $80 to buy ‘morphono.com’ with the intent of ‘linking together places on the Internet’ and their initial public offering on Nasdaq would bring in millions of dollars. It, like most irrational ‘booms’ in the economy, was not sustainable. Sure enough it came crashing down in 2000 and 2001 and most/all of these businesses are gone now. Some companies founded during the dot-com boom or otherwise beneficiaries of it, however, remain successful—Amazon.com, Ebay, and technology firms like Apple are a few examples.

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