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To: limtex who wrote (37312)	7/27/1999 11:36:00 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 152472

Limtex, as you know, I'm a fully-fledged member of The New Paradigm fan club and was the ONLY person on this planet who predicted a Dow of 8,000 Feb 1998 and Dow 16,000 Feb 2002 back in mid 1995. The rate of increase in productivity has to slow down? Did he say that? Can you quote precisely? Oil isn't the only commodity the demand for which or supply restriction of which can cause inflation. Anyway, everything is a commodity in the sense that they all take human effort to produce and all can be in shortage or surplus, such as the ThinPhone, the price of which goes up if demand is huge. Which, fortunately, it is. Given that there are 6bn people and they are nearly all trying to make things better for themselves, and only half a century ago there were way fewer than that, living much more insular lives, it is near impossible for the rate of productivity improvement to do other than become faster still. Even a decent nuclear war would only slow it down temporarily. The biggest slowdown and even rapid reversal would come if the democratic mob votes to be more like India. Since it is a democracy, it could well happen that we will, collectively, vote ourselves into a government run, bureaucratic, repressive way of life. China, Vietnam, North Korea, Russia all went into that 'greater good' hole. It's happened all through human history. I suppose it can happen again, and writ large at that! It isn't quite right to call OPEC gangsters, in that they don't attack anyone. They just agree to reduce their production to keep prices high. That's just a restrictive trade practise, much the same as the USA does, for example on lamb trade; the USA stops New Zealand selling lamb. Not gangsterism at all. Why should OPEC sell their oil at a price to suit you? No reason at all. Unless you are actually the gangster and are thinking of stealing it from them by force and they are better to get what you will permit them to have lest they get shot. There is nothing Alan G can can do about OPEC. All he can do is adjust the money supply so that the oil price doesn't change. That means, if oil prices are trending up, due to supply restrictions, reducing the money supply so that fewer dollars are available, which will mean a barrel of the stuff can be bought with fewer of them. That will increase interest rates. But Alan G can't control the quantity of oil that OPEC will sell. My guess is that he actually said the economy can't keep accelerating, which is not the same thing as saying productivity can't continue to increase. If the economy does do well, of course he wants interest rates higher. That's a pay rate increase for savers and it gives him flexibility to lower them when, inevitably, people go from mania into depression or whatever the bipolar disorder called the stock market is called. Mqurice PS: Morgan, drivebys of the poorhouse are very exciting. I went skimming past last September when Zenit crashed and the 50 year financial panic nearly ended it all. That was a LOT of fun. It's disappointing that we haven't had the Dow do a good crunch down again as scheduled on 21 July. The thrills are fun. Hmmm, must be 21 August. The pitiful decline so far isn't even a pulse raiser.