[.ca] The Bubble and the Bear: How Nortel Burst the Canadian Dream (ISBN 0385659180)

Amazon.ca:
At the start of the new millennium, Enron dominated the business news in the U.S., but it was Nortel that grabbed the Canadian headlines by the throat. The saga of the telecommunications giant may have lacked Enron's element of venal criminality, but Nortel's own sorry story has proved equally important. The seemingly invincible behemoth--once the stock of choice for a vast number of mutual funds and pension plans--came tumbling down in 2001, affecting millions of Canadian investors, large and small, in the process. Douglas Hunter's account of the rise and fall is subtitled How Nortel Burst the Canadian Dream, and that's not an exaggerated claim. The crucially important Nortel story is told clearly and effectively by Hunter, an experienced business journalist who previously authored a biography of Canada's largest family brewer, Molson: The Birth of a Business Empire. The author tells this "cautionary tale of stock market mania" via interviews with investors, Nortel employees, and stock analysts. He's especially critical of analysts and the business media (termed "the chattering classes") for getting caught up in all the hype, boosting Nortel stock to giddy heights during the tech stock boom of the late '90s before, inevitably, it crashed and burned. In dollar terms, share value went from a high of $124.50 (U.S.) in July 2000 to a low of well under $1.00 (U.S.) by September 2002. In his preface, Hunter notes that "the pathologies of the analyst industry are so vast that they deserve a book of their own," but his critique is a good start. "A hot stock behaves like a hurricane, generating its own weather," Hunter writes, showing his knack for a well-turned phrase. After following the devastation of Hurricane Nortel, investors who read The Bubble and the Bear may just want to keep their money under the mattress. --Kerry Doole