At the end of the century, the United States is an economic juggernaut, the envy of the world. Investors, riding a wave of euphoria, flock to the financial markets in an unprecedented speculative flurry. A century ago it wasn't so different.

The 1899 parallels with today's booming economy are remarkable. Then as now, the Dow Jones industrial average rallied in the final three years of the century - about 70 percent through the end of November in both cases. Commentators saw similar reasons for the gains: globalization, better technology, medical discoveries, the move to a market versus a command economy. Even the one or two stray clouds on the horizon seem similar. In 1899, much trepidation arose over a rise in the Bank of England's discount rate to more than 6 percent, to curb excessive strength in the economy. This year, the 30-year bond yields move above 6 percent has caused similar distress.

In 1899, the bulls were stampeded by an unfavorable Supreme Court decision on a merger involving Addison Pipe. Today, antitrust regulators are going after MicroSoft, periodically searing the daylights out of the market. The hopes of the 19th-century optimists have largely been achieved in the 20th century. Life expectancy has doubled. The cost of a long-distance call and a unit of illumination have each decreased some 99 percent. The number of public stockholders around the world has grown 100-fold.

From 1899 to 1999, the Dow average rose from 66 to 11,000. Adding in dividends of about 3 percent, that works out to a compounded return of 8.25 percent. An investment of $100 in the Dow average in 1899 would be worth $280,000 today. General Electric Co., one of the 12 Dow stocks in 1899, sells for about 150 today, some 20 percent above where it traded 100 years ago. But that's not counting dividends, and the fact that one 1899 share of GE would be 400 shares today, because of stock splits. That's before the 3-for-1 split that GE plans in January. That same $100 invested in GE would have grown to $8.3 million, taking splits and dividends into account.

The 19th century did end with a "buying panic" that sent the Dow up 13 percent in the last 10 trading days of 1899. One little problem: before the buying panic, there was another kind of panic. The Wall Street Journal referred to it in December 1899 as "the most disastrous stock decline in the history of the New York Stock Exchange," and there had been some doozies. The Dow industrials dropped 23 percent from the end of November through Dec. 18, 1899. The Wall Street Journal, recounting the days leading up to the rout, reported the collapse of a bubble in copper stocks, bank bailouts in Boston, and a report of a disastrous British setback against the Boers in South Africa. In its own assessment of the carnage, the Commercial & Financial Chronicle of 1899 sounds as gloomy as Barron's does today: "It was a natural sequence of our overdone good times in marketing securities during the first months of 1899," the Chronicle's editors wrote. "As the penalty of a reckless speculation can never be escaped, it may truthfully be affirmed that we are better off today than we were 12 months ago." Then we had our troubles ahead of us. Now we have them behind us."

The lesson may be that human nature doesn't change. Fear, greed, hope, excessive optimism and remorse still roil the markets, setting us up for great booms - and great panics.