Personally, I think it was the influence of Andrea Mitchell.

Asia Times Online :: Asian news and current affairs

In reality, the economic problems of the Chinese are - as are the problems of all exporting nations around the world...the result of the loathsome Alan Greenspan creating all the unholy mountains of excess money and credit when he was chairman of the American Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006, which he infamously did to finance The Greatest Sin Of All (TGSOA), which is to allow the monstrous enlargement of government and to pay for huge increases in government programs, and for which Greenspan deserves to die in prison, alone, sick, vomiting up blood and hearing my voice ringing in his ears, "Suffer, you miserable bastard, as you have made so, so many billions of people suffer by your insane expansions of the money supply!"

And how did the horrid Alan Greenspan do all of that? Easy! His creating all that money and credit meant that all those trillions of new Treasury-debt dollars originally sprang into being as loans to the government, which it spent, and from there the dollars eventually went to pay for a trade deficit that ranges around US$800 billion Per Freaking Year (PFY)!

This meant that all those other countries had the trade surpluses that equalled our trade deficits, and all of those new dollars pouring into their countries necessitated similar monetary stupidity in those other countries, hurriedly creating more money to soak up those new dollars piling up in their banking system, increasing their money supplies in lockstep with us, lest their own currencies gain strength against the dollar and thus effectively raise prices to us, their huge, and essentially only, customer! Horrors! Hahahaha! We're all freaking morons!

In 1997 Alan Greenspan married Andrea Mitchell and came into frequent contact Katie Couric (Today's yesterday host) and the whole NBC news team. Before 1997, Alan Greenspan spoke of irrational exuberance in the stock market. After 1997, he became irrationally exuberant himself. This is what happens to a very smart guy who comes into Continuous Close Contact with a TV News Division (and one of their special op's people). Normal folk, who just watch them on the big screen (we've been undergoing screen inflation), will just become irrational.