...The late ‘90s was a period of strong economic growth...
thanks in large part to the dot_.com bubble, which eventually burst.
I remember asking the wife how in the world our community could afford one giant big box store after another. Two WalMarts within a couple miles, lowes and home depot next to each other and two more five miles away, big Bo’s garden stores, an empty Target ten miles from a target across the street from the WalMart 5 miles away. And then I realized, they weren’t selling PRODUCTS, they were selling shares. And boy were they.
That was in the 1990s. Fast forward 2008. Boom. All those stores are still open. It is just everything in between is now vacant and shuttered.
The economic growth in the 90s was largely fiction. I recall BJ invited the CEOs of the top 100 to lunch for his first 100 days. “to reassure them”.
I don’t know what he told them but I suspect that it went something like, “This ‘new math’ thing is something we are all struggling with so it may be a while before we can really sort things out.”. They figured it out. Cook the books. Well, they figured the “new math” out real good right at the end. Can anyone besides me remember “Enron”?
Suicides and shame devastated corporate board rooms. THAT was the famous “dot com bust”. Meanwhile the Community Re investment Act was chugging through the banks setting up tranches of AAA junk in US Real Estate. So they not only engineered the “good years” but built the bomb that blew up in 2007 really, the shock wave didn’t destroy things until 2008.
So when I see folks talk about the Clinton Economy in 1990s I realize they had at least a couple of hemings of the Kool Aid.
Yes, the dot com bubble did burst, but the tech revolution that powered it is still with us today and has transformed our economy into the powerhouse it is. Bubba had nothing to do with it. Reagan's tax cuts, military spending and massive deregulation in the 80's created the technology revolution of the 90's. He also created NAFTA. Best president since Lincoln!
And that was an incredible boom for which Slick Willie deserves no credit. Algore gets all the credit for that.
But it was an incredible boom to the economy as every variety of communications company began building the infrastructure to offer internet service, plus the permanent jobs created and the tens of millions of consumers who began to subscribe to internet service, and all the ecommerce that was created as a result.
All having nothing to do with anything Slick, or Algore did. And it was only partially a bubble as much of it became a longer term, growing part of our economy.