Like a film running backward, many of the corporate giants that grew quickly to prominence in the 1990s are shrinking at an even faster rate. Icons of the New Economy, such as WorldCom, Enron, and Global Crossing, are disappearing in a haze of bad accounting. Corporate America is being forced to issue restatement after restatement, signaling that much of the earnings booked in recent years were manufactured rather than real. And the stock market is languishing: The Standard & Poor's 500-stock index is down 17% since the start of the year. Taken together, these problems are leading many economists to wonder if the New Economy boom was, in the end, simply a bubble, overhyped by the press and by Wall Street, and that many of the gains of the 1990s will disappear as quickly as Enron Corp. collapsed.
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