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Magazine hype as leading indicator
In September of '08 I noticed a get-rich-quick scheme on the cover of Entrepreneur magazine, and wrote that it looked familiar - I'd seen similar nonsense in 1999 and 2000.
Today in the NYT, David Brooks writes:
There are no aspirational stories of rags-to-riches success floating around. There are no new how-to-get-rich enthusiasms. There are few magazine covers breathlessly telling readers that some new possibility -- biotechnology, nanotechnology -- is about to change everything. That part of American culture that stokes ambition and encourages risk has gone silent. We are now in an astonishingly noncommercial moment.
Note to self - look to the magazines as leading indicators of the next bubble's pop, about a year in advance.
I actually counted and graphed the number of pages of Internet related magazines back in the dot-com years. It did reach a climax point and collapsed when the bubble burst. It seems to be a coincident indicator. It has done the same thing in this recession.