The dot com bubble can’t easily be laid at the door of government.
Personally I think there’s a basic instability in the system due to large amounts of money (retirement and investment funds) looking for the highest returns and the ability to move that money quickly. It isn’t obvious to me that there’s anything to be done about it short of accepting it, as in simply living with it.
When some sector of the business world starts showing higher returns than the others, money starts rushing towards it to get the highest returns. In doing so it creates its own positive feedback system making it unstable. As the money pours in, prices go up due to an increase in demand, the price going up shows up as even larger returns on investment and so more money flows in to chase it in a viscous cycle until the bubble pops.
In a free society, it isn’t clear to me what can be done about it.
Credit bubbles on the other hand are creations of governments. Being a creation of government it can be sustained unnaturally for far longer periods until the results are catastrophic. That’s what we’ve done to ourselves this time.
You're right - it was almost all caused by hype, speculation, and greed. But recall that, when the bubble imploded, the government did exactly the right thing: nothing. The free market worked, sanity returned, and a lot of people lost a lot of money they mostly deserved to lose.
Oh yes, and the company I'd worked for went belly up. But I'd already jumped ship - shortly after the CEO announced we could stop worrying because he'd secured a fourth round of financing. By then, I'd boned up on enough basic economics to realise that this was the writing on the wall.