The images showed hundreds and thousands of people queuing and jostling in lines that snaked around countless city blocks. The excited, bordering on belligerent, throngs were not queuing for the new Sony PlayStation, however. The venture, however, had the backing of Li Ka-shing, Hong Kong's most powerful tycoon, and a shareholder in the stellar Pacific Century Cyberworks. South Africa has watched in stunned silence as Net nerds rose from what seemed like every other garage in the United States to make millions overnight. Investors and economists spent the better part of the 1990s debating whether there was actually a new economy, or whether a dazzling, but short-lived, visitor was temporarily obscuring the traditional economic cycle of peaks and troughs.
Naysayers dominate the early debate.
With stock valuations so high on the basis of little more than a promise, it seemed almost a sure bet that the market would face a correction. Again in 1987 the market crashed. But the new economy has taken no heed of warnings that would detract from its celebrity, least of all US Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan's attempts to take the tiger out of the economy with interest rate hikes. More than just lasting, the Nasdaq's successes have totally eclipsed the traditional cycle of rises and dips, and rewritten the law of gravity that dictates that what goes up must come down. Have your say Mail the editor South Africa, however, may be in a far better position than new economy global markets to deal with the fallout that will ricochet around the world.