Or perhaps not. Since the commercial banks established hegemony over the world's financial systems at about the turn of the century, most periods of financial folly have been fully intermediated by the banking system. That helps to make the boom less flamboyant, partly because the personal risks and rewards for a typical commercial banker are less tempting than for an investment. But it also makes it much more dangerous, because of the role the banks play in accepting deposits and transmitting payments. Banks are too important to lose, so governments have to bail them out.
Intermediated bubbles drag in everyone.
So the IPO surge is a relatively harmless way of soaking up a temporary mania. The apparent initial success of the dotcoms pushed established business to react in months rather than in years. So the bubble produced a much more rapid transformation of existing businesses, and the much more lavish creation of a global electronic infrastructure. That means that the web era has only just begun, which is the fifth lesson I draw from these past remarkable years. There just won't be a capital-markets frenzy to speed the process.