Totally. And similar things in the early 1960s. Or about real estate several times: late 1980s, mid 2000s etc eg "buy land, they aren't making any more of it". I remember John Grant's publication (Interest Rate Observer?) that researched the price of a Boston office building built in the late 1800s, all the way to early 2000s - sold 3-4 times over that period. What was remarkable was there were decades when the price did not move, or even fell.Sounds like what people were saying in 1999 and 2000.
(The actual evidence on city center office pricing is that it appears the locational value of the land rises by (from memory) 1% less a year than real GDP. The explanation being that there is economic growth, but new technologies allow cities to spread out - so suburban and exurban locations have grown relative to city center).
Many of us have seen 3-4 market cycles. There's always a boom, and there's always a bust after. During that bust, the startups that do get funded are of higher quality than what came immediately before. The structural trends (such as the growth of the internet) continue, although they may pause for a bit. Whereas Microsoft and Amazon still dominate the internet arena 25 years later, other companies have fallen by the wayside, and new companies (Google, Facebook) have risen in their stead. (Actually MSFT has never been a great one for the internet, it's the monopoly on desktop software that has survived the cycles. Their real competitor now is Apple, and I mean the iPhone -- how people spend their time and on which OS. Unless say China comes up with a viable alternative that leads to mass switching away from Windows Office & Windows).
You live in Detroit area? Over the last 80 years we have certainly seen the cycles, and structural decline. From "Motor City" and GM being the largest employer in the USA (and a determinant, on its own, of GDP figures) to a much more geographically dispersed industry now. It's not that the industry sells fewer cars, but the value in electronics may be much more in Korea or Japan (chips), parts can be in the South, Mexico and Canada. Ditto assembly. It's not really clear that a car is "from" any particular place now, all you can say is "assembled".
Silicon Valley is not immune to such cycles. Read Andy Grove at Intel. The "internal coup" which got them out of memory chip manufacture. PC manufacture was once done in SV - I doubt there's much (if any) hardware manufacture going on there now. It probably has the highest gross value added per employee in the world for a geographic area, but it's all in software, design & specification.
(That said, I remember the Clint Eastwood Superbowl ad. Still makes me a bit teary eyed. "Chrysler. Imported from America" -- the Grand Torino in my mind).
Statistics: Posted by Valuethinker — Fri Dec 19, 2025 5:08 am — Replies 121 — Views 11768