The comparison everyone argues about
Every version of this argument uses a different index, a different window, and an alignment chosen to make its point. So we did it the boring, checkable way: one index (NASDAQ Composite, FRED), both eras, monthly closes, aligned at each boom's start — the 1996 Telecom Act and the November 2022 ChatGPT moment — indexed to 100. No peak-picking: aligning at the start assumes nothing about where today's cycle tops.
Reading: —
What this does and does not say: the telecom-era tape peaked 48 months after its boom started; this cycle is at month 44. That is a fact about shape, not a prediction — two cycles are a sample of two, the anchor choices are judgments (stated above), and nothing here forecasts when or whether this cycle peaks. What the overlay is for: making the last mania's shape visible while standing inside this one.
The deeper story is what the price tape can't show: in 2000 the "demand" was vendor-financed — Lucent alone carried ~$15B of customer financing against ~$300M of operating cash flow, and the overcapacity had a name: dark fiber. Today ~$540B of committed AI compute rests on ~$35B of filed outside equity (~15.5×), and a hyperscaler is renting out its "excess AI compute." The structural analysis, edge by EDGAR-verified edge, is in the papers below.
Go deeper: The Ground Truth Tape (the live instrument) · The Recycling Ratio (12 pp) · Walk the Loop (54 pp) · what would prove us wrong.