Along with four other international mega-mergers, the total volume of merger activity in just five weeks at the start of 2000 amounted to more than half a trillion dollars (Pryor 2001, p. 825ff.). As everyone knows by now, the TimeWarner-AOL merger ended in a messy divorce. .

             The Dot.com boom was another 'climactic factor" that helped form the environment into which Enron moved so boldly. Moreover, the writing was on the wall globally, and not just in the United States; Enron was, of course, deeply involved in offshore enterprises through its Special Project Entities (SPEs). In the first quarter of 2000, Collier quoted a Morgan Stanley international financial analyst as estimating that "70 per cent of internet companies which have already gone public will never make any money" (2000, p. 8). While some analysts didn"t think that possibility-or more properly, certainty-would have a disastrous effect, others who commented at the time were cautious but negative nonetheless concerning the possibility that the boom would not bust. A spokesman for an Edinburgh, Scotland, merchant bank, Singer and Frieldander, didn"t" think the bubble would "actually burst, because the internet is here to stay and some of these companies are going to do very well indeed. But I think it could certainly deflate" (Collier 2000, p. 8).

             In fact, they crashed, something that could have been predicted by any reasonably seasoned theoretical mathematician. Nikolaus Bernoulli, in the early 1700s, had formulated "problem in the theory of games of chance, now known as the St. Petersburg paradox" that fit perfectly with what happened in the market for high-tech stocks in 2000. .

             "The St. Petersburg paradox explains some of the unprecedented increases in the prices of high-tech growth stocks in the late 1990s. During that period, the Federal Reserve System"s discount rate was near a historical low.