Endorsement money boomed.
The big club chairmen who saw themselves as visionaries then - and, mostly, fancied making money for themselves out of their shares - never envisaged the Premier League's TV money booming to its current, world record-setting £2.7bn over three years.
For a while, the easy-money boom allowed everyone to overlook the fact that peripheral economies like Greece's or Portugal's were not gaining competitiveness or "converging," but amassing unsustainable deficits and debt.
In the summer of 1997, Combs initiated hip-hop's big-money boom with a eulogy for Biggie called "I'll Be Missing You," in which he rapped over "Every Breath You Take," the eighties chestnut by the Police.
The internet was funded by public money in boom times, as were biotech and nanotech.
But instead of saving money in boom years, the state locks in higher spending on public services and embarks on projects that need long-term investment.
But, as elsewhere, public services are insufficiently responsive to customers and often fail to deliver value for money.The boom years of the Celtic Tiger allowed the country to pour money into education and health care.
Perhaps more valuable than the hundreds of billions in government money, the boom years introduced the capital to tens of thousands of young and educated workers who arrived for the promise of some job — any job — and, in the process, married, had a kid and needed to upgrade to a bigger place.
With its phosphate supplies near exhaustion, and the island still required by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development's financial action taskforce to crack down on the recent money laundering boom - engendered by its lax financial regulations - the processing of people for petrol could lift Nauru out of its economic hole.
