How Safe Are Today’s Blockbuster Tech Stocks?¶
Today’s wave of mega-IPOs has unleashed a wave of analogies to past booms. While no analogy is perfect, an especially apposite—and sobering—case may be what followed Nippon Telegraph and Telephone’s IPO in February 1987.
DARTMOUTH, UK—Questions about the financial implications of radical new technologies—AI, space travel, and their associated infrastructures, to pick a few—have led to a veritable analogy-fest. Is this a replay of the railway boom of the 1870s, which came to grief in the 1880s? A repeat of the electrification boom of the 1890s, which unfolded smoothly but took three decades to play out?