Yet the reality, increasingly, is that they can't and don't leave the bubble -- the bubble moves right along with them, except that it is no longer merely a bubble, it is a heavily fortified multiple-city-block mobile bunker.
But during the just-pricked bubble, it wasn't the Scrooges and the Marleys who lent more than 100% of the purchase price of a house without bothering to verify the income or employment of the applicant, or even to insist that he or she pay down a little bit of the principal now and then.
We can't go back to a bubble-and-burst economy based on reckless speculation and spending beyond our means, where a relative few do spectacularly well while the middle class loses ground.
The idea--and remember that ideas didn't have to be very sound at the peak of the Web bubble--was that the wizards in Redwood City, Calif.
Then-Chairman Greenspan's "irrational exuberance" speech was in December 1996, with the bulk of the dot-com bubble to follow, but the Fed didn't even hike reserve requirements to send a warning shot across Wall Street's bow.
"It was the most dot-com-bubble name I could think of, and I didn't want people to know what we were going to do, " he says.
In its other pro-business ruling this week, the court decided on Monday that Credit Suisse and other investment banks weren't guilty of setting stock prices during the dot-com bubble, as some investors had alleged.
And here's what all that means: This debate, which affects millions of middle-class families, isn't happening in a typical Washington bubble where pundits and policymakers talk past each other as they try to rack up political points.
In its other pro-business ruling this week, the court decided on Monday that Credit Suisse (nyse: CS - news - people ) and other investment banks weren't guilty of setting stock prices during the dot-com bubble, as some investors had alleged.
And you don't get as many distortions as you've gotten in this sort of bubble-and-bust cycle that we've had.
The all-night raves and black-tie affairs that symbolized the tech bubble of the late '90s are out, but that doesn't mean Silicon Valley has forgotten how to party.
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