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To: Carolyn who wrote (4231)	9/15/1999 3:31:00 AM
From: elmatador	Respond to of 7442

Thta's that rear mirror glance one should do, once in a while, even if the road ahead is all for yourself, remember that I mention before? The Japanese are repatriating USD. From the Financial Times this morning: Dollar sinks as deficit reaches record high Analysts fear that the trend will continue, as stock prices fall and the value against the yen hits a three-year low. By Alan Beattie in London and Mark Suzman in Washington The dollar sank sharply yesterday as a record current account deficit and strong retail sales data threatened a shortage of capital flows into the US. Stocks and bond prices fell in the US after the data were released, raising the prospect of international investors fleeing the US for other markets. This drove the dollar down to a fresh three-year low against the yen of ¾105.1. The current account deficit soared to an all-time high of $80.7bn (œ49.7bn) in the second quarter, a 17.5 per cent increase from the revised $68.7bn deficit in the first quarter and a record both in dollar terms and as a share of gross domestic product. Although the deficit was only slightly higher than market expectations, it increased analysts' concerns that there is little end in sight to the trend. Yesterday the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed 1.09 per cent down, while the benchmark long bond fell nearly 1 point to 100 1/8, sending the yield up to 6.115 per cent. The US currency's strength has been sustained for several years by foreign investment in US assets. This has compensated for the deficits on the current account, which mainly comprises trade in goods and services and income from investments abroad. But recently Japanese investors - the largest foreign holders of US Treasuries - are reported to have been deserting US assets and repatriating capital to Japan, helping the yen to rise. Yesterday the Bank of Japan intervened in the foreign exchange markets for the second time in a week to slow the yen's appreciation against the dollar, but their estimated $1bn-$2bn sales of yen had little effect. The US has said it supports the principle of a strong dollar but has indicated it is not prepared to intervene in the currency markets at this stage. Analysts said that with the dollar weakening, there was increasing doubt in the markets whether foreign investors would continue to prop up the current account deficit by buying US assets. "Foreign investors are asking themselves why they should keep funding the US to consume itself silly," said Tony Norfield, global head of treasury research at investment bank ABN-Amro. The Commerce department also reported yesterday that retail sales rose by 1.2 per cent in August to $252.4bn, up 10.6 per cent from the same period a year ago. The rise between June and July was also revised up from 0.7 to 1 per cent. The largest increase came in sales of durable goods, which rose by 1.8 per cent on the month and were 14.1 per cent up on last year. Mr Norfield said the retail sales data contributed to a fear that the Federal Reserve was "behind the curve" on restraining US growth and would have to raise interest rates. The biggest culprit in the current account deficit was a continuing imbalance in goods and services, as a hoped-for increase in exports to recovering Asian economies failed to materialise.

To: Carolyn who wrote (4231)	9/15/1999 9:48:00 AM
From: Blue Snowshoe	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 7442

CNBC "EXPERT" lesson for the day. Joe Kernen was just stating how ORCL was down 5+ and trading 11 million already. Then CNBC's guest expert jumped in and said something like "let's not forget there is a buyer for each seller." Gee, what a news flash, you learn something everyday. Any bets the "expert" is long ORCL? Someone carve his statement in stone, I'll have to remember that one. Dah. 909S BLUE

To: Carolyn who wrote (4231)	9/15/1999 10:00:00 AM
From: elmatador	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 7442

XML: Another piece falls in place of the next next gen network. There are already portfolio of XML software solutions and services, which will support Microsoft?s BizTalk to enable cross platform electronic commerce over the Internet. DataChannel's XML Framework enables the enterprise to exchange information between disparate systems while protecting their investment in existing technologies. Working with industry leading partners, DataChannel's offerings unleash the power of Enterprise Information Portals (EIPs), facilitating the way companies share information with employees, vendors,customers, and consumers across intranets, extranets, and the Internet. Solution Partners Advanced Client Server Solutions AB Andersen Consulting Ardent Software ITS Libra Software Lockheed Martin Microstar STI Tecnologia da Informacao Team Force BV ISV Partners Aventail Tibco Manage.com OEM Partners AT&T Labs Crescent Deviceware Pipeline UK POET Software QuikSilver Software AG Alliance Partners Microsoft Oracle Sun Surprised not to see CSCO in this list? Don't worry. TIBCO is there and Cisco's Don Listiwin seats in its board. Watch your language DATE 26-Jun-99 ONE of the biggest impediments to e-business is that computers are not very bright when it comes to recognising context. Most people who use the web have been through exasperating searches that deliver either thousands of useless results or, even more bafflingly, next to nothing. As Microsoft?s Bill Gates says in his new book, ?Business @ The Speed of Thought?, a query about the fastest computer chip on the market could easily produce information about the rapid delivery of fried potatoes. The problem gets even worse when businesses are trying to communicate complicated catalogue or stock information to each other. This is because the web?s main language, HTML (hypertext markup language), is essentially superficial. It tells a web browser how to lay out the contents of a web page, but it remains blissfully ignorant of the content. The solution seems blindingly simple: use tags to label the content, rather than describe what it looks like. For example, HTML would label the elements of an order for a pair of trousers as boldface, paragraph, row and column. If they are tagged as price, size, quantity and colour instead, a program can identify the document as a customer order and do whatever is needed to get the trousers to the recipient as quickly as possible. In the nick of time to allow e-business to take off, the World Wide Web Consortium ( W3C ), a not-for-profit group that controls web standards, has come up with an extension to HTML called XML (eXtensible Markup Language). XML not only describes the nature of web content, it also provides a way of indexing data. Its system of tagging data with relevant information allows applications running on other computers to respond in an appropriate way. For example, XML makes it clear that ?The Economist? is a newspaper and not a particular economist. By using metatagging, data that describes other data, XML can also speed searches in the way a librarian?s card index can. The only drawback is that for XML to work properly, there has to be some agreement on definitions. It may be possible to achieve this within particular professions or industries, perhaps using an information intermediary as both initiator and ring-master. But to ensure that there is a shared language of business on the Internet, cross-industry initiatives are also needed. To its credit, Microsoft is actively engaged in just such an initiative, which it calls ?BizTalk?. It is using its market clout to bring together disparate customers, computing-industry vendors and consortia to define XML schemas (electronic dictionaries) to describe common business processes. For example, Microsoft and SAP have begun defining schemas for exchanging product-catalogue information and business documents. Microsoft intends to incorporate BizTalk into future versions of its Office, BackOffice and Windows programs but, perhaps unusually for the company, it is going for open standards that will allow integration across all platforms, regardless of the underlying technology. As the Yankee Group?s Harry Tse says: ?Microsoft can win by not controlling XML .?