Jay, I wonder where ACFlyer has gone.
Over the decades I have noticed that occasionally Kiwiland gets visits from people who, like Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan in Iceland, are not really there for the fishing or scenery.
A couple of days ago we had Junichiro Koizumi swing by on the way home from a trip to Australia. I notice Hu Jintao making a debut visit to the USA. We've had Hu Yaobang and other political heavyweights at other times; people who are not interested in 50 million sheep and 4 million sheeple.
Junichiro's visit and Hu's USA visit and other straws in the wind make me think they are getting their ducks in a row. There are some weighty issues on the agenda these days. Oil, currencies in tenuous balance on the edge of Argentina-style precipices, Osama and co wishing global destruction, Saddam in GeorgeW's sights, [Saddam has done well to cause a ruckus in Israel and Palestinian zones, thereby dragging a red herring in front of the USA], Taiwan, North Korea, Iran. Tibet can wait. Russian oil. Caspian basin oil and Afghanistan pipeline. United Nations. World Trade Organisation.
I believe we'll soon see some large scale co-ordinated actions by the USA/Japan/Taiwan/China/Russia/Australia/Britain/Hobbitland gang and a few sidekicks.
I think your post was on the mark.
Increasingly, we seem to be singing the same tune. I am relaxed about the continuing market crunching although I wish I had sold even more of my QUALCOMM. However, thanks to some timely buying and selling of Globalstar Senior Notes and QUALCOMM, I am now in a position I had zero thought of being in a year or two ago, but a much better one than then. Abandoning an exposed hilltop position if necessary is okay by me!
As you said, [some time ago], it does feel good to have a Tonka Truck full of cash instead of leveraged overpriced shares. I now have the Buffett attitude - cheaper shares are better bargains for me.
I am amazed at the extent of restructuring that has been required to get asset values, incomes, work, savings, interest rates, currencies and buying decisions back into a harmonious relationship after the biggest market capitalisation increase and decrease in human history, by a long way.
Having attended the Telecom99 show in Geneva, which I nicknamed "Going Critical" [as in a nuclear explosion sense], I was well aware of the most amazing confluence of money, technology and people in a telecosmic mass mania over cyberspace, and telecommunications which enables it.
For 3 years now, I have been expecting and predicting this cleanout and was worried about how markets would restructure for 3 years before that. So far so good in Uncle Al having avoided a cascading collapse in a few days or weeks which would have been totally disastrous, out of control and more similar to a black hole implosion than a restructuring. BUT, I really didn't think the size of the collapse would be anything like this. I imagined that the rate of development and market growth would soften the impact. However, internet time has slowed to a very ordinary rate. A week used to be like a year. Now an internet week is not much different from a 3D week. CDMA subscriber growth has moderated to a rapidly developing business. But it's still relentless - cyberspace is NOT going away. It is getting a stronger grip on everyone even while many think it was a one day wonder.
There are existential forces driving it as powerful as the coiling of DNA with greater consequences than DNA development.
Meanwhile, the political and military forces fiddle around in the chimpoid world of 3D humanity, but fortunately, they seem to be disinclined to any of the mass total war excesses of the 20th century. It's almost a joke that the UN wanted to send in a group to investigate the Israeli invasion of the Palestinian zones, where "mass murder" involved perhaps 6 innocent, accidentally killed, civilians and 50 or so Palestinian fighters. If the UN wants to investigate some immoral violent actions, they should investigate Yasser Arafat and the deliberate murder of a 5 year old girl and suicide bombers who mass murder civilians whenever they get a chance and Saddam funds them [allegedly anyway]. The UN should investigate funding of suicide bomber families and pre-bombing promises of funding.
Okay, rant over,
Mqurice |
