Who got the money? I know somebody who got some of it. They got a student loan at 7.5% interest, bought Globalstar at $3 split-adjusted, sold it at $35, bought Techniclone at 70 cents, sold some of TCLN at $1.20 to buy back the original Globalstar stock at $10.50 AZ [after Zenit]. It wasn't me, I just took a roller coaster from $3 to $36 and back down to $10.
Your point is one of my favourites; it is a zero sum game. Money doesn't go missing. For every seller there is a buyer. No dollars evaporate. But they do get printed, year in, year out and move faster. Diluting holders who get 3% or so interest.
There are as many dollars hanging around looking for a place to go now as there were before the market drops. Dougjn is trying to pick the bottom, thinking stocks must fall. I agree with marginmike, things are great and getting better. I also agree with him on the 'let's scare the crowd', commonly called shroud waving. There was never a significant threat to male heterosexuals who didn't have blood transfusions or get needles stuck in their arms because they can't catch AIDS from women under normal circumstances. The statistics on AIDS were plain as day way way back in 1983, reported in a Time magazine about December. It was obvious that the vectors of transmission would rapidly dwindle as people reacted to the threat and by about 1990, the disease would be at its peak. But the authorities and vested interests caused as much alarm and noise as possible. While the disease is terrible [like any problem] for the people concerned, the overall population impact compared with poor diet, smoking, lead in petrol, breast cancer, cervical cancer, genetic diseases, car crashes, is relatively trivial.
But it was popular and a lot of money was scared up by all the hysteria. Anyone could see that anal sex, injecting drugs, women having sex with infected men, being born to an infected woman, blood transfusions were the few ways of getting the disease. Those are all relatively easily avoided. So the disease lives on borrowed time.
They have given up trying to drum up a lot of noise in New Zealand now because the disease is quickly fizzling out. We had a one man epidemic here from Kenya who wantonly infected several women. Was jailed and finally sent back to Kenya where he died. Good riddance. In Britain and New Zealand, they used advertisements showing attractive young women, saying they were an infective threat; a simple falsehood.
Now there is the big hoohah over the financial crisis. No worries. It is easily fixed. If my margin gets too high, the broker grabs my Qualcomm shares, sells them really cheap to Dougjn. The same money exists. The same shares exist. The same cellphone sales exist, except that Doug gets the cellphone instead of me! When the big fright goes away, the stock gets voted back up to a high level, Dougjn laughs and buys a Globalstar phone to go with his boat. Qualcomm continues to make heaps of money and I get a real job, perhaps scrubbing Dougjn's boat down for food.
At the moment, Dougjn is squealing because his interest rates are dropping like a brick. He isn't really squealing because he fancies he is going to buy Qualcomm really cheap soon. Ha! Ha! Ha! to you Dougjn. You will be out of luck and miss out as the markets roar back up when all you bond holders try to time the bottom of the market with your devalued, diluted, overprinted US$. So you'll sit there in two years looking at 3% interest while Qualcomm returns 20% on today's share price. Don't forget to pay tax on your 3%. Oh, and deduct inflation too!
Mqurice
Dougjn, re "...And preventing LTCM from undergoing forced liquidation that essential."
What was wrong with letting LTCM go bust? Warren Buffet was going to buy it. I also had $1000 spare so I could have bought it if they didn't like Warren's offer. LTCM assets should have been easily liquidated. You have been deprived of your rightful windfall for judicially holding a bunch of cash, which has now been diluted and used to rescue the LTCM owners and employees. You and Ramsey have been diddled and should complain to Alan Green$pan. You could have got GSTRF for $5 if LTCM had to sell their holdings under duress. |
