It's not just retail sales, it's also IT budgets, which hurt Intel more than AMD. The areas that help Intel are servers and notebooks, which are still growing (I hope), and where Intel doesn't have a lot of competition.
Agreed on all counts (including the "I hope!"). It's hard to get a good handle on IT spending, whereas retail sales data is released more frequently.
This market sure could use some good news, and it looks like the only guy that could come up with that is Mr. Greenspan, and he's not due on stage until March 20th (?).
Agreed again... It's going to be an interesting economic puzzle at this point to sort out... and I don't envy the policy makers. In a year we've gone from a booming economy with a surplus (okay, be fair, they were borrowing out of medicare... but still) to an economy that is teetering on the brink of recession or worse, stagflation.
It's hard to sort out all of the contributing factors, but I think in the long-run the following will have contributed most to the reversal (though, of course, none of them are independent):
1) Greenspan slamming the brakes on a run away stock market. The dow has been essentially flat since May of 1999, and the NAS is back down to April 1999 values after shedding 50% off of its highs.
2) Collapse of the dot com's. People finally realized profit potential does not equal profit, and all of the unprofitable companies got weeded out... Unfortunately most of them were on the NAS... unfortunately most of the big high-tech players had a stake in them... unfortunately a lot of people lost their shirt...
3) Increase in energy prices. Skyrocketing oil costs put a bite in everyone's budget... Every time it happens, everyone says "we've got to decrease our dependence on foreign oil." Unfortunately there's no easy way to do that... so nothing gets solved... prices normalize... and it's business as usual.
4) California energy crunch. The biggest market in the state has been lights out off-and-on for two months...
Anything I've missed???? |
