O'Neill: Dow May Hit Highs Within 18 Mos.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - As stocks tumbled on Wall Street on Monday, Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill said that it was ''conceivable'' U.S. blue-chip stocks could approach record highs again within 12 to 18 months.
``I think it's conceivable we could be approaching the top on the Dow side in another 12 or 18 months,'' O'Neill told CNN cable news network. referring to the Dow Jones industrials. While no one can know for sure, he said, the Dow has not fallen so far that ``we couldn't be looking at records again when we get into the middle of the next expansion phase in our economy.''
O'Neill, delivering an upbeat economic message in a series of television interviews from New York on the first day of U.S. stock trading after a four-day layoff, stressed that he did not think the U.S. economy was heading for a recession.
``The last few months, I thought the positives outweighed the negatives -- not by a lot but by an amount -- and that with the flow of funds that was going into the economy a week ago today, I would have said then and I will say now, I think we're on the way back,'' O'Neill said.
On the efforts by the United States to wage ``financial war'' on the perpetrators of the attacks, O'Neill had some strong words. ``What you're going to see now is an all-out attack on, first of all, labeling terrorists and suspected terrorists and then systematically going after financial assets,'' he said.
``Not just waging a usual kind of war against these kind of people but waging a financial war and enlisting the leaders of the civilized world countries and their financial institutions in helping us identify who these people are and where their money is, and taking it away from them.'' |
