The current financial crisis isn't just much more severe than the dot-com bust. It's about an entirely different kind of speculation. For those of you who might feel a pang of déjà vu coming on, make no mistake: The Wall Street meltdown is a completely different phenomenon than the dot-com bust, and not just in magnitude. Yes, both were born of bubbles that popped spectacularly. But even when the dot-com boom was at its worst and lame startups celebrated ridiculous IPOs, a host of other ventures were creating technology of actual value. What strikes me about the current mess is how hard Wall Street labored to create the illusion of value where it never existed at all. Take credit default swaps, an obscure financial instrument soon to become a household name. If the crisis in mortgage-backed securities doesn’t scare you, then the unregulated $45 trillion (or is it $70 trillion?) market in credit default swaps will. These were basically insurance policies to protect investors from bad debt, but they were so elegant and complex, the institutions that traded credit default swaps felt the chances they’d be on hook for settlements were minuscule. Now we’re in domino mode. [ Learn how the financial crisis is affecting IT and the high-tech industry, plus what IT can do to help, in InfoWorld’s special report. | Think it’s time to go the startup route? Find out how to get hired at a hot startup or start your own high-tech business. ] Several times removed from reality, thriving in an opaque never-never land completely free from government oversight, the diabolical genius of credit default swaps is brought to you by the same investment bankers who brought outrageously overvalued startups public during the boom and flipped them a few weeks later. At least in the IPO glory days, the speculation was out in the open.Ironically, to Wall Street, the value of tech during the dot-com boom was even more opaque than an arcane derivative. It was a bauble that could be tossed skyward with IPOs and lobbed on the trash heap after the smartest investors made a killing. Yes, there were plenty of willing accomplices to this speculation in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. But Wall Street was never much interested in determining the real value of tech innovation, although it delighted in encouraging certain analysts to inflate valuations with tech happy talk.After the bust, investment in tech innovation tanked and never fully recovered. The fad was over. It’s a little known fact that during the bust, perfectly good technology conjured by failing startups was sold off at fire-sales prices to companies — or governments — in China, South Korea, Taiwan, and other countries. Meanwhile, Wall Street moved on to cool new forms of real estate speculation and derivatives so obscure we probably haven’t heard about all of them yet. What a waste that so much intellectual horsepower went into mathematical abstractions so far removed from real value. Especially when there’s still so much intrinsic value in U.S. technology development, which just keeps chugging along from Silicon Valley to Route 128, regardless of the latest elaborate Wall Street betting scheme.When the dust clears on this financial disaster, investment in tech should be a key part of the plan for recovery. If and when that happens, the architects of irresponsible speculation should take a long, long vacation. Technology Industry