[A tech industry spin on Wall street mess -warning this is a blog and thus opinion]

Easy money. Easy credit. Greed. No real financial stability. Unreal expectations. Is that a description of the current Wall Street crisis or the tech bubble boom and subsequent bust of the late 1990s?

The two are not identical, but the parallels between them are undeniable and some economists are arguing that the tech bubble brought us to our current financial disarray.

While the stock market bubble of the 1990s went beyond tech, we never really cured the underlying problem. Instead, the tech boom before the bust gave financial institutions a taste of steep gains, leading them to mortgage-backed securities as they looked to duplicate such highs. The housing market caught the illness, handing out lofty mortgages and credit to many who find themselves in foreclosure because they aren't capable of making payments.

And now, near 10 years later, here we are again with a struggling economy. The one big difference between Wall Street's current crisis and the tech bubble being that Uncle Sam didn't come along to bail this industry out of its stupidity. Wall Street never fully recovered from the tech burst and it seems to have learned little if anything from its mistakes....
http://www.edn.com/blog/1750000175/p...rid=1275931920