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Technology Stocks : All About Sun Microsystems -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Frank Ellis Morris who wrote (28112)	2/22/2000 12:25:00 PM
From: Charles Tutt	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 64865

We'll see whether I'm an optimist or not. I've got a buy order in at 88 1/4. Will it trigger? If it does, will that mean I'm an optimist or a pessimist (i.e. an optimist because I'm buying, or a pessimist because I put it in at a price below current)? BTW, can anybody tell me what tax cuts Bush is always talking about getting for us Texans? I haven't noticed any drop in my taxes since he took office. I assume he cut business taxes or something? JMHO.

To: Frank Ellis Morris who wrote (28112)	2/22/2000 12:53:00 PM
From: QwikSand	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 64865

Frank: Nobody would want Alan Greenspan's job. He gets blamed by everybody for everything. He can't win. Have you spent any time on the bear religionist SI thread, which is called "The Naked Truth -- Big Kahuna Is a Myth"? It's an instructive experience, because a lot of those guys are very smart and very financially sophisticated even though (like almost everyone else) they suffer from one sort of delusional fixation or another. These people also hate Greenspan, but for exactly the opposite reason that you do. They refer to him as "Easy Al". From these bears' point of view, getting rich from the stock market is not every American's God-given right. Rather, they believe we are in a bubble similar to the Japanese economic bubble of the 80's and the American bubble of the late 20's. You, Frank, think that the great technical leaders and visionaries at INTC, MSFT, DELL, SUNW, whatever, have redefined the economy to the point where all you do is take a few bucks, invest in the fruits of their labor, hold on and get rich. But the bears believe that in fact the prices of these stocks have been inflated out of all proportion to their actual worth, creating a huge bolus of fake wealth that, when it inevitably vanishes, will destroy the American economy and bring on the worst depression in U.S., and possibly modern world, history. According to the bears, how did this bubble arise? One guilty party is the witless, greedy herd mentality of average investors, who are referred to variously by the bears as "clowns", "fools", "Joe Six-Pack" and many other derogatory names. The other guilty party is, you guessed it, "Easy Al" Greenspan, who has the Fed "print money" (increase the money supply) to finance the herd's get-rich-quick mentality and appease the politicians. You don't like it when Alan Greenspan talks about using monetary policy to reign in excess demand, because it causes a down day in your Intel stock Frank? Well there are plenty of people, and I must say many of them seem quite a bit more knowledgable than you, who believe that the crash of '29 was at least helped along by the Fed's refusal to take similar action despite obvious signs of the unsustainable, speculative economic heat that eventually boiled over. You and the bears disagree diametrically. And guess what: IMHO there is some truth to both of your positions. I agree with you on one issue: there is evil and corruption on all levels. Most of it is on Wall Street and elsewhere in the financial community, plenty of it is in Washington (but the idea that somehow one major political party is more corrupt than another is a joke), plenty of it is in corporate boardrooms where a goodly number of CEO's and CFO's are crooks who deserve to go to jail and sometimes even do. You find corruption wherever there's money. But I have seen no evidence of more corruption in the Fed than in other agencies of government. Certainly they are subject to political pressure from all sides. But the central bank's job is a tough one. Everyone hates them. Their job isn't to help specific investors or businesses, but to keep the economy within certain bounds. They get blamed for anything bad that happens or even seems like it might. But when the economy is going along great guns, thanks in part to their correct exercise of monetary policy, they get no credit whatsoever except among a few intelligent unemotional people. I'm not sophisticated enough to even understand all of Greenspan's job, Frank. And guess what: neither are you. I don't know enough to defend him, and you don't know enough to attack him. The media says something every day about why the stock market is doing what it's doing because they have to sell ad space. That doesn't mean that what they say has anything much to do with the truth. Stocks move up and down. If you want to post a Reuters article explaining the micro-motion of the day accompanied by some half-assed emotional resentment-filled political rant, please do it on your own thread. Regards, --QwikSand