Will the stock market continue to rise, and if so, how far and for how long? Those were questions market analysts asked as the decade drew to a close. Many apparently looked forward to an endlessly prosperous future, believing that the U.S. economy had undergone a fundamental structural change. Edward Yardeni, chief economist for Deutsche Morgan Grenfell, was lyrical in predicting a "new-era economy" driven by information technology, global markets, and world peace that promised to generate unprecedented corporate earnings and continually rising stock prices. Yardeni and others who shared his perspective posited a "long boom," which would carry the economy past all the difficulties and limitations that formerly hampered it. In an essay titled "The Long Boom" published in Barron's in 1997, Peter Schwartz and Peter Leyden took readers on a journey through a twenty-first century economy so affluent that the problems of...