ABSTRACT
In 1999 and early 2000, a cliché, or rather a mantra, was being chanted by stock market gurus over and over again, ad nauseam. It went something like, “the U.S. economy is engaged in a struggle between the old economy and the new.” Businesses that constitute the “old” economy are the so-called basic materials that made the twentieth century the “American century”: paper, steel, utilities, aluminum, general manufacturing and heavy industry, industries that powered America through the world wars and into its fantastically prosperous peace.
