by Paul Wallace

About the author: Paul Wallace is a former economics editor for the British newspaper Independent and a frequent contributor to the New Statesman, a magazine published in the United Kingdom.

You may think that whoever coined the name Oxygen for the latest soar-away Internet company must have had a sense of humour. The financial bubble in dot com stocks is hardly short of air. But it is just as likely that Oxygen Holdings’ twentysomething venture capitalists—whose ritzy media backers include Matthew Freud and Elisabeth Murdoch—don’t see the joke at all. After all, they’re incubating (nothing so mundane as investing in) start-ups in the new e-economy of virtual value and endless boom. Financial bubbles are a fuddyduddy discredited old economy...