Would also add that the era of “easy money” even predates 2000 and the dot-coms. You could trace this back to the Southeast Asian financial crisis of 1997, and just generally all the emerging market crises of the mid to late 90’s (Mexico, South America, Southeast Asia, Russia).

One of the reasons we got the dot-com bubble, even though the Fed was aware of it, was that they were more afraid of instability from the emerging markets than a domestic bubble. That fear was certainly justified, but nonetheless the dot-com bubble was still enormous.