But after the 2000 burst of the dot-com bubble and the World Trade Center attacks of 2001, Sheppard found that people were less open to innovative, quirky ideas and more concerned about money.
It was not surprising, then, that its exports should have fallen in the past year as the technology bubble burst and the world's biggest economies headed for recession.
The second and no doubt leading contributor to the gold bubble has been the world financial crisis of 2008-2009 and the subsequent worldwide central bank policy of monetary expansion to fight financial asset price deflation.
During the Internet bubble Cisco was briefly the world's most valuable company, but now it and Microsoft together have a market cap about equal to that of Apple.
In just a few chapters, he outlines the forces that brought the world to the brink of a bust: a house-price bubble boosted by runaway mortgage lending in the rich world, particularly America, a lightly regulated global financial system that found ever-more creative ways to speculate on rising house prices, and macroeconomic policymaking that was far too laid back about the dangers posed by asset-price bubbles.
ECONOMIST: The reasons for the crisis and how to stop it happening again
It was as though my head was in a bubble, and the world and my film were far, far away in the background.
Nor does it correspond to the madness of the credit market bubble prior to 2007 when every fool in the world was buying mortgage backed securities without understanding the value of the real estate that backed them or the fantastically dangerous amount of leverage they were playing with.
But, Greenspan asserts, much of the world experienced a housing bubble between 2001 and 2006 and, therefore, he and the Fed are largely blameless.
Anyone with any imagination has been expecting some sort of crashing in of the larger world into this little bubble of American bliss for years, if not decades.
BBC: News | NEWSNIGHT | Jonathan Franzen interview transcript
Once the most valuable corporation in the world back in the late stages of the tech bubble in 2000, Cisco Systems (CSCO) remains a key supplier of telecommunications and networking equipment that grows with the usage of the Internet.
No model in the world can prevent a financial bubble if monetary policy is too lax, or a recession if it is too tight.
As with the run-up to those events (though on a larger scale), what we are witnessing now is simply the inflation of a world-wide bubble, which will sooner or later burst with agonizing consequences.
FORBES: Buy Now, Pay Later: How the Fed's Tinkering Created A Global Crisis
But eventually, we have to leave the safe bubble of family life, take what we learned as children and apply it to the real adult world.
Thanks to the bursting of the housing bubble in 2008, the US is currently ranked as the best place for capital appreciation in the world real estate markets, according to Real Capital.
During his last years in power, Saddam was living in a bubble, a fake world sealed off from the real world by underlings too scared to tell him anything other than a pack of lies.
Add in China and South Africa, and two-thirds (by economic weight) of the world that we track now has a potential housing bubble.
And incidentally, that could have protected you from the great Japanese bubble because when Japan had its real estate and stock bubble, Japan got to be 50% of the world's capitalization.
Where Andy Warhol mused everyone will be famous for 15 minutes and that brave new world where animated TV family The Jetsons fly around in domed bubble cars to get from point A to point B.
The bears too have been surprised by the system's resilience, but they still see a large remaining financial bubble which they fear may burst, possibly plunging America and the world into a depression similar to that of the 1930s, or at least of the past decade in Japan.
However, as the U.S.-Soviet Cold War structure collapsed, and the world economy entered an unprecedented period of globalization, the 1980s Japanese economy bubble burst.
Are we witnessing a commercial real estate bubble in emerging markets, people, or is this just more evidence that the Western world has lost its lure?
Interest rates hit 21.5%, a deep recession ensued with unemployment reaching 11%, the agricultural sector slid into depression, a bubble burst in the energy sector, the real estate industry collapsed, and third-world debt burdens nearly brought down the mega banks.
Then it took off during the bubble years of the new century, only to gain even more traction as the much of the western world plunged into economic crisis.
Returning to LinkedIn, while today's story about its IPO may be about whether it represents a new financial bubble in the Internet sector, the story in years to come will be its symbolism in changing the world in which social media companies operate.
America's stockmarket bubble has been partly financed by foreigners, notably the Japanese, who account for one-third of the world's savings.
Games, such as Bubble Ball, are a great way for the youth to stimulate their brains and express innovative ideas on changing the world.
FORBES: How Gaming Can Save The World And Add 10 Years To Your Life
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