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Strategies & Market Trends : The Stock Market Bubble -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tommaso who wrote (3231)	6/7/2000 3:19:00 PM
From: Professor Dotcomm	Respond to of 3339

Your comments have some appealing aspects - or at least they did when individual governments could play around with their own money supply. As I see it today, the fading relevance of countries with their own curious pieces of cloth they call flags or even many state backed religions with their own particular brand of saints and sinners, is starting to change the rules of what used to be called the 'store of value'. There is much wrong with globalization but at least it can sweep away the many myths that used to dictate the real constituents of value. Why gold? Because people distrusted politicians - and they were right. Equally silver - but at least silver does not have to worry about huge overhangs of supply like gold and it is now developing an intrinsic value as distinct from a fiduciary value. I think gold will too - but we are several years away yet. I have to think that the real constituents of value have to be entwined with those of productivity - at least until we fall into the same mistakes of the past like wars or trade wars ( - or perhaps water or carbon dioxide wars?). Perhaps I am putting too much faith in the improved world relationships - economically, increased travel or more international sports which seem to be reducing racial prejudices. All of these factors affect the nature and the composition of what is a 'store of value'. That is until the next major catostrophe hits the earth - such as a mega volcanic eruption that affects the global food supplies.

To: Tommaso who wrote (3231)	6/10/2000 12:58:00 PM
From: kormac	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3339

It might not be the oil price that causes this bubble to burst, but actual shortages. !!! with my best, Seppo ----------- By CLIFF EDWARDS, Associated Press REDWOOD SHORES, Calif. (June 9, 2000 7:28 p.m. EDT nandotimes.com) - High-tech companies wield increasing power in the U.S. economy, but they could lose power in the coming months unless a nationwide energy shortage is quickly addressed, participants at a regional energy summit warned Friday. The U.S. Department of Energy and energy experts in several of the nation's largest electricity-consuming states say the possibility of extended blackouts looms large this summer and next, representing the potential loss of billions of dollars to high-tech firms that rely on uninterrupted power sources. "Our aging power grid is not able to meet the needs of the information age," said Carl Guardino, president of the high-tech industry organization Silicon Valley Manufacturing Group, which sponsored the summit. Computers and computer peripherals now consume about 13 percent of the nation's available power, a figure that has soared from less than 1 percent since 1993 as the Internet becomes a preferred method of doing business and communicating with each other. But the construction of new power-generating plants and transmission lines to meet that demand has virtually ground to a standstill in the same period as companies wait to understand the effects of deregulation of the electric utility industry. The imbalance threatens to grow even larger in coming months amid projections that electricity demand will grow 17 percent by 2007 as transmission capacity rises only 4 percent. The one-day Silicon Valley Energy Summit - "Where the Digital Economy Meets the Grid" - brought together California lawmakers, regulators, businesses and energy providers to discuss increasing concerns about the looming energy shortage as companies race to update the nation's aging energy grid. The U.S. Department of Energy noted in a recent report that "the reliability of our electric grid is faltering" and warned that Silicon Valley and other regions of the country should be on alert for power shortages. One of the problems with electricity is that it cannot be stored for long periods to form a viable reserve. That has forced utilities to set up grids crisscrossing the nation and extending up into Canada that can route unused power from one area into another. For instance, a summer heat wave in the Midwest might increase air-conditioning usage, forcing utilities there to buy excess power from New England where temperatures might be cooler. But the boost in high-tech companies' power usage increasingly is forcing individual states to turn to the grid for power, resulting in occasional price spikes from about $40 per megawatt-hour to as much as $10,000 a megawatt-hour. The increasing energy needs also have taxed utilities' equipment across the nation, resulting in widespread power outages such as two extended outages last summer in Chicago and one in New York. "The power system that we have today was not designed for the measures of reliability that would support a silicon-based society," said Karl Stahlkopf, vice president of EPRI Corp., a Palo Alto-based research and development company working to understand and develop new solutions for the nation's utilities. Much of the talk about solutions Friday centered around building generating plants close to where they are needed, but lawmakers noted widespread opposition among consumers to constructing facilities in their neighborhoods. "If you try to build new transmission lines, you ... have to kill somebody," said state Assemblyman Roderick Wright, chairman of the Utilities and Commerce Committee. "While everyone wants more power, no one wants power plants built near them." Jeff Byron, energy director at software and data-management company Oracle Corp., said his company took an approach that many high-tech firms are likely to emulate: "We built our own power plant for emergency energy needs" at a cost of $6.5 million. Byron noted that utilities can promise only 99.9 percent reliability - a figure that translates to about eight hours of blackouts a year - while high-tech firms stand to lose millions of dollars from a blackout lasting just a minute. "We need 99.9999 percent reliability for e-commerce, and we need more flexibility from regulation to achieve that," he said.