Time to bring on another Y2K. (Flip Side).

A friend of mine who gets paid to know this sort of thing insists that the Internet bubble was largely fueled by the Y2K scare. Terrified that their businesses would not function once the new millennium arrived, corporations the world over purchased enormous amounts of high-tech equipment they did not actually need. When Y2K turned out to be a baseless fear, a mirage and perhaps even a hoax, capital investment in information technology began to cool off. Then, when the bubble popped, there were no more gun-shy buyers available to gobble up all that inventory that had been built up over the previous few years. That's when things got ugly.

I have no way of knowing whether this theory is correct. I personally prefer the Good Time Charlie Axiom, which stipulates that the economy always falls apart when a two-term president leaves office. This approach posits that a two-term president is capable of creating a mood of prosperity, alacrity and general good feeling that immediately vaporizes once it is apparent that he is leaving town. In the case of Bill Clinton, a combination of a booming economy, an dating Fed, no serious external enemies and almost preternatural good luck coalesced to create the hysterical optimism of the '90s. At the end of his term, things disintegrated.

The same thing happened with Ronald Reagan; we all remember the Crash of '87. It's almost as if the president exerts a talismanic effect on the economy, until the day the magic inexplicably stops working. Now I don't know whether this is a plausible or defensible theory. But I sure made a lot more money in the stock market in the early years of those two administrations than I did toward the end.

What fascinates me about the Y2K theory is the possibility that what worked before could work again. If an entire economy was propelled into the stratosphere by a marketing gimmick, a misconception or a dumb mistake, we sure could use another marketing gimmick, misconception or dumb mistake. Franklin Delano Roosevelt might have been wrong when he said: "There is nothing to fear but fear itself." In this case, fear was the engine of spectacular economic growth; it was the dispersal of that fear that caused the economy to fall apart. Throughout the '90s, U.S. businesses kept buying things they didn't need because they thought they needed them. When they realized they didn't need them, they stopped buying. Pretty soon nobody was buying anything because everybody was afraid to spend money. By making the rational decision to cut back, American businesses hastened the onslaught of the recession. You call this progress?

What this country needs today is a glimpse of the apocalypse. When America saw Hitler trying to take over the world, it started spending money like there was no tomorrow. When America started worrying that Y2K was going to close down the entire global economy, it started spending money like there was no tomorrow. Well, now it's tomorrow and a lot of us wish it were still yesterday. I miss those Industry Standards the size of the Manhattan Yellow Pages. I miss those days when Amazon.com traded at $400. I even miss those Bill Shatner commercials for Priceline.com. I want my New Economy back.

What this society needs to do is to put out an all-points bulletin for the guy who dreamed up the Y2K nightmare scenario and see if he has any others handy. Maybe a concerted effort by merchants of fear and latter-day Cassandras could persuade American businesses that unless they buy a lot of new computers, servers and storage devices, three hackers in downtown Manila are going to shut down the Internet forever. Maybe we need 150 Internets in case a couple dozen go on the fritz.

Or maybe corporations could be persuaded that unless every single employee has a 52-inch high-definition television in his office, no one s going to be able to keep up with evolving trends in the marketplace. Or perhaps we should put out a rumor that because of a programming glitch in UNIX, Y2K won't arrive until 2005, but that it will definitely come.

Yes, what this economy really needs is a good, old-fashioned specter of imminent disaster. As the old saying goes, if it ain't broke--break it.

Joe Queenan ([e-mail]) also writes for Barron's, SmartMoney and The Wall Street Journal.