The S&P 500 closed down today, again, at 752, the lowest level since 1997. That was a long time ago. We've seen two booms pass by — first dot-com stocks and now the real estate bubble. In 1997, I was still in college, Bill Clinton was still president, no one had heard of Monica Lewinsky, and Rudy Giuliani hadn't yet cleaned out the open-air heroin markets in the East Village. So, let's remember what's passed in between, now that the last eleven years have been, financially speaking, wiped clean. All those corporate-sponsored parties, those condominiums, the blinged-out phones, the Maybachs. It may as well have never happened.

Send an email to Gabriel Snyder, the author of this post, at .