Not long ago the stock market was a glorious form of entertainment and a way to make money fast. But now, with the Nasdaq down 35 percent from its highs in just a few months, the market has become an almost daily reminder of the fragility of human hope. The change in mood on the message boards has been palpable. Intel continues to fall. Microsoft continues to fall.
People decide they've lost enough money and buy CDs.
As you might imagine from their titles, these books are guaranteed to make all but the most resolute optimists grouchy. But neither one, unfortunately, offers much help figuring out where we will go from here. An economics professor at Yale University, Shiller tries to explain how our overly inflated markets got that way and what will happen when they revert to the mean. Mandel's book is far more substantive, packed with facts and analysis drawn from close observation of the New Economy. Mandel, who as economics editor of BusinessWeek has championed the sort of New Era thinking that Shiller so dislikes, offers gloom without so much doom.