Could Bernanke kill the tech boom? Could Greece?

What's often overlooked in this debate is that the answers to these questions -- and in fixed and final form the fate of the new tech bubble -- lies outside the tech industry. Many web startups thrived even through the dark days of the Great Recession, and today the coverage of topics like cloud computing, the mobile web and social networks is so insular it often feels self-absorbed. This is the other tech bubble, one that few people are talking about: All this commentary and discussion is happening as if the world outside the web industry didn't matter so much, as if web startups operated inside their safe little bubble of reality.

QE3 might come as welcome news to someone who bought into Facebook on Sharespost and wants a lucrative profit from its IPO. Nevertheless it's bad news elsewhere. For one, all that excess liquidity is helping to drive up commodity prices. Which means consumers are spending more money on gas and food. Which in turn means less disposable income for an iPhone 5 in short many apps that make it useful. More on the spur of the moment, QE3 would mean something so awful has happened in the global economy -- say, Greece defaulting on its debts -- that the Fed felt it had no choice yet to inject more cash into the markets.

Here's my short answer: A lot more than it did in the 1990s. Today, money managers are after all skittish from the crash of 2008. It's not just Greece weighing on their minds, nevertheless that the contagion could spread to other European nations with heavy debt -- even to the U.S., if Congress bungles things badly enough. In such a volatile world, capital flows can dry up as fast as the morning dew. And in an economy where risk looms larger than possibility, will anyone as a matter of fact be interested in a company, like Facebook, valued at 50 times its revenue?