Sure enough Maurice, there was some bargain shopping came up and the Dow did drop to 7500 and even a bit below. Taking Qualcomm all the way down to $38 briefly as margined people and those terrorized sold out.
But, just as Big Dippers do, we are heading on up after a gripping ride down, complete with a butterfly taking off in Russia crashing, Long Term Capital Management coming to grief in part because of betting on that butterfly with an extremely geared position which threatened to bring on the derivative lead debt collapse and all time world record market clearing effort as a trillion securities were cashed in which you'd feared for the past couple of years.
Looks as though jfred was wrong that there would be a deflationary collapse which the money printers and market clearers couldn't cope with. Well, so far anyway.
Okay, what's next? This Y2K thing's going to be a fizzer don't you think? Oil is cheap. Civilization is gaining ground. The Club of Rome worries about a Malthusian population disaster are not going to happen either. In fact, where are the people going to come from? Who's going to buy the Anita [TM] gadgets? Women aren't pregnant and barefoot in the kitchen anymore.
It seems that good breeding stock are going to be able to demand a goodly price if any guys want them to have children with them. Of course, women might prefer to simply clone the genetically high quality children that they prefer and leave the weird old arrangement of random DNA combinations of two arbitrary gene pools in the ark, where they belong.
There seems likely to be a huge population bust over the next 100 years. With photovoltaics making hydrogen for clean burning transport fuel, it seems that demand for crude oil could drop very fast. Or maybe methanol from natural gas and fuel cells will do the trick. Crude oil will be used for power station fuel, jet fuel and the like.
Now that we are getting the Carbon from crude oil and coal back into the ecosphere, where it belongs, we should get a more lively earth. Hopefully the greenhouse effect will happen and we'll avoid the next ice age, which was about due. Even if the earth warms up a bit, people can move from Venice, which has had its day, up to Varese or somewhere as nice. People can abandon New Orleans, moving up the Mississippi to a hundred metres above sea level. Even with all the ice melted and the ocean warmer and therefore deeper, which means rising, there will be heaps of land left to live on. Way better than an ice age, which is really bad news.
Since all the C got buried, the earth has cooled. Way too much.
Many happy returns to the baby boomers turning 50 today!
MIW. |
