China's Y2K? The 2008 Olympics ...

Many a pundits would argue that the binge of expenditure and investing in dotcom era companies came to a tickle, after the enormous binge of spending to squelch a bug called the year 2000 bug: it was then (late 1990's) thought and quite aggressively pursued that because the internal clocking systems on computers could handle only two-digit years, "00" for the year 2000, would be interpreted as the year 1900 and we would be send to the stone age. Nothing of the sort came along, of course, but enormous amounts of money were spent on "fixing" this bug.

A few months later, the Nasdaq and other stocks with it crashed into oblivion.

Next year, China is going to put on a spectacular show, likely to be the greatest fireworks show on earth: the 2008 Summer Olympics. This year alone, the cost of putting this show together is going to be around $40 billion. Although this is small compared with the GDP per capita of close to $2000, it is a large fraction of its construction economy. Given the history of post-Olympic malaise in previous host countries, one would have to wonder, if this whole episode, would turn into an ugly China Y2K. We will have to wait and see.