
The dot.com Bubble
Internet stocks in the late 1990s traded on visits and clicks rather than profits, and this Open University program uses that bubble to explain how speculative markets inflate and collapse. It walks through the mechanics of intrinsic, informational, and fad bubbles, then grounds the theory in one case: Tom Hadfield, who launched Soccernet at age twelve and sold it to ESPN for forty million dollars by seventeen, a story that shows how quickly hype outran any real measure of value. The film asks why standard valuation methods broke down when a company's worth was pegged to web traffic rather than assets, and what made investors keep buying past the point where the numbers made sense. It closes by tracing the bubble's aftermath into new speculative territory, including the debate over whether green technology investment shows the same warning signs. This is the first installment of an eight-part series on economic bubbles.