It would be far easier if I just did what you guys did here, take the popular view
this may come as a shock, but your views seem to be very much the popular ones. perhaps if you did watch CNBC you would see that all the fund managers they have on there every day urging people to buy stocks have the same rosy outlook you do. they also rely on easily accessible mainstream statistics like "6% unemployment", and they also recite positive anecdotes about their inlaws who make more money as unemployed than they did in the workforce.
do you really think the market would be trading at more than 30 times earnings and 4 times sales and one times GDP--all twice the historical averages--if the bearish views expressed on this thread were widely held?
You all worry about stuff that is easily debunked
is it just out of concern for our fragile male egos that you've never debunked any of it?
and never talk about the stuff that is the most dangerous
OK, sounds like an interesting subject, so let's talk: what is most dangerous? my answer to that question is, nobody knows because LIFE IS FULL OF SURPRISES. maybe SARS is the most dangerous thing and it was just a twinkle in some Peking duck's eye six months ago. maybe Ice-9 is what's most dangerous. who knows?
probably the most dangerous thing is something you'll never expect. true story: i get paranoid on airplanes, especially prop planes. had to fly on one recently. imagined all these disasters but made it home safely. later on, driving a ho-hum road to see Cirque du Soleil, this big truck coming from the other way hits a pothole and tips over on its left-side wheels, practically at a 45-degree angle bearing straight on me. it was 20 feet from my face and it could've taken my head off. the thing righted itself, luckily, but that could've been that. here i was worrying about the airplanes when along comes a truck hitting a pothole and it could've been my doom.
maybe it was! maybe now i'm just living in a computer-generated after-life like in Vanilla Sky. but the market's still overpriced.
the point is, the most dangerous thing is unknowable.
So what's your contingency plan for when the end of the world as we know it fails to materialize one more time?
i have no contingency plan. i don't need one. i retired in my early 30s in 2000 thanks to the tech bubble. why do you think i have time to engage in these silly arguments between golf rounds? :) |
