The Bubble and The Bear: How Nortel Burst the Canadian Dream

The Bubble and The Bear: How Nortel Burst the Canadian Dream recounts the dramatic rise and fall in Nortel stock value and tracks its devastating effects on personal  savings and investments in Canada.

Once the stock of choice for a vast number of mutual funds and  pension plans, the stock came tumbling down in 2002 sacrificing millions  of investors across the country, both large and small, in its wake.

The Bubble and the Bear is a “cautionary tale of stock market mania”  that draws on interviews with Canadian investors who lost tens of  thousands of dollars, Nortel employees, and the precious few analysts  who foresaw the collapse of the stock.

Why did mutual funds and pension plans gamble so heavily on Nortel?

Why were most analysts cheering from the sidelines, unprepared for Nortel’s dramatic revenue plummet?

How did Nortel get away with presenting earnings that made losses virtually disappear?

Why did the bubble burst?

Hunter provides a critical examination of the role that analysts and  the business media played in boosting the Nortel stock to giddy heights during the tech boom of the late 1990s before it crashed and burned.

In dollar terms, Nortel’s share value went from a high of close to  US$125 in July 2000 to a low of less than one dollar by September 2002.

“A hot stock behaves like a hurricane, generating it’s own weather,” writes Hunter. The Bubble and the Bear is a chart of Hurricane Nortel’s course of devastation as Canada’s most costly stock gambles.

Douglas Hunter has written widely on business, history and sport. He has published articles in Saturday Night, The Globe and Mail, and The National Post.

Hunter’s previous books include War Games, Open Ice and Molson: The Birth of a Business Empire. He lives in Severn Sound, Ontario, with his wife and three children.