Big Talk

Once upon a time, people purchased books about the stock market. (Now, they read Internet articles instead, about which I will not complain.) Among the most popular of those titles was Dow 36,000: The New Strategy for Profiting from the Coming Rise in the Stock Market.

Dow 36,000 differed from other best-sellers in that its authors lacked star power. James Glassman was a former Washington Post columnist who appeared on Sunday morning political talk shows, and Kevin Hassett had worked briefly for a think tank. What the book had, instead, was impeccable timing. Its publication date was October 1999, the height of the New Era.