Technology
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
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Rules:
1: All Lemmy rules apply
2: Do not post low effort posts
3: NEVER post naziped*gore stuff
4: Always post article URLs or their archived version URLs as sources, NOT screenshots. Help the blind users.
5: personal rants of Big Tech CEOs like Elon Musk are unwelcome (does not include posts about their companies affecting wide range of people)
6: no advertisement posts unless verified as legitimate and non-exploitative/non-consumerist
7: crypto related posts, unless essential, are disallowed
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Right, and also just making shit up. Enron's executives literally could not describe how they made so much money. The secret ingredient was crime.
The 2008 crisis was at least somewhat rooted in reality. It was a risk management strategy that - in theory - let them lend out a looot more money, by being less likely to lose money, even if they gained less per-dollar. But of course every single asshole involved cranked up their flour-to-sawdust ratio and promised nothing could possibly go wrong.
I think it's worth including finance shenanigans alongside tech bubbles, because even if finance isn't tech, tech bubbles are absofuckinglutely just another finance shenanigan. The dot-com bubble didn't burst because people stopped using the web. It was all about obscene sums of money being thrown at stupid ideas. Some of those stupid ideas worked! If not for the investor-class expectation that you turn the crank and get ten dollars for one dollar, we'd simply describe the period as one of naive experimentation. Better environments would allow people to try their big stupid ideas using their own money, or mundane business loans, instead of trying to attract millions and promise billions.
It's only a bubble because greedy idiots pump it up. Without that, failures are still news, but they don't become a historical event.