2000 General Overview
March 11, 2000 and a crack in the Stock Market is just the opening act to Friday, April 14, when Wall Street experiences its biggest one-day fall in history. This week US markets lose $2 trillion in value, mainly NASDAQ hi-tech companies. Bill Gates sees his personal Microsoft fortune drop $30 billion in a few hours. It becomes abundantly clear that the dotcom crash is signaling a gross over-valuing of technology shares. In the following two years the NASDAQ Composite crashes 78% as it falls from 5046.86 to 1114.11.
The neck-and-neck presidential race continues beyond election day, when, on December 13th, 36 days after the election and the flurry of lawsuits, counter suits, appeals, and bitter partisan bickering, George W. Bush is declared President-elect. The 2000 election will go down in history, not only for the ‘hanging chads’ gridlock in Florida, but also for the way in which it split the Supreme Court, which had never before stepped in to rule on a federal election.
At 25, Tiger Woods orchestrates one of the most spectacular seasons in sports' history when he wins nine of the 20 PGA Tour events and becomes the second golfer in history to win three of professional golf's four major tournaments in a single year.
Real Estate Overview
During January, HomeStore.com (NASDAQ: HOMS) becomes the newly born real estate dotcom darling and peaks at $138 per share. Two years later, after the resignation of founder and CEO Stuart Wolff in the wake of an accounting investigation (which results in a substantial restatement of revenues) the company’s share price hobbles at a decimated 32 cents. What starts as “an investigation into potentially anti-competitive conduct involving the online realty listings industry” by HomeStore, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) gradually widens the investigation into numerous facets of organized real estate brokerage, formally filing suit in 2005 against the National Association of Realtors®.
