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To: abuelita who wrote (27221)	7/30/2000 9:43:40 PM
From: Voltaire	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 35685

Well well, like I said, here we are once again faced with disaster - Doomsday Again -- Big Deal By James J. Cramer 7/30/00 6:22 PM ET The pessimism seeps into every pore. People want to hide from this market. They have been scalded by LSI and crushed by Lucent. They've seen the Fed tighten six times and expect more ahead. They shake at the prospect of two presidential candidates who have never run an economy and who may be predisposed to screw it up. You can count the positives on one hand. To which I say, what else is new? It always looks pretty crummy out there after the market's come down. You always feel like there's nothing good on the horizon and the fears seem 10 foot tall compared to the pygmy hopes that once existed. I can't say what will turn things around right now, but I can tell you that it's wrong to focus only on the negatives. Take, for example, one of the biggest worries that the U.S. government has right now: the shrinking supply of U.S. bonds. The possibility that we're losing liquidity in the benchmark market has Fed and Treasury officials spooked. Oh my. What irony! For more than 10 years the biggest bear case for stocks and bonds out there was, "What will happen when the foreigners sell our bonds?" For more than a decade I had to listen to bears telling us, "Look out, the Japanese are going to sell our bonds to kingdom come to raise cash and when they do, the bottom will fall out of the bonds, the dollar and the stock market." For more than 10 years I listened to them say that the size of the U.S. deficit in the end has to bring us down because the recession in Japan would lead the Japanese to liquefy their holdings here, spiking rates and bringing the whole edifice crashing down. Wrong! Totally wrong! We are now in the anomalous position of actually hoping the foreigners dump their treasuries. We need them, in part because there aren't enough treasuries for state and local governments to put their money into -- one of the only legal places for them to hold their proceeds. We need the Japanese to dump their bonds so that Japan can get back on its feet. (Anybody taken a look at the Nikkei lately? Looks like that country is headed back into depression like we were here in '36 and '37.) Yes, our biggest nightmare -- the mass dumping of treasuries by foreigners who want nothing to do with our lame government and its deficit -- has turned into the dream that we can only hope happens to save the treasury market from losing its relevance and worth. Of course, just like the bears who now tell us that the stock market is over and the Fed must raise rates forever, the bears who spewed this foreign treasury dump rap are nowhere saying, "Sorry, we got this one really wrong." In fact, one of the biggest lifetime bears, Henry Kaufman, just penned a book in which he's still fretting about foreign dumping of treasuries. (Editors, could you show some backbone please?) One of the reasons why everything seems so dire is that those who make the grim predictions never get defrocked for their mistakes. So they continue to be able to exercise their preternatural dispositions to doom quite freely. I can't invest in irony. I can't say that people who are worrying about the Fed or stock prices plummeting are going to be wrong this time because they always are. That's too glib and the damage is too palpable. But I can point out that the biggest bear case of my lifetime turned out to be much ado about nothing. It wouldn't shock me if this downturn turned out to be yet another chance to buy. Which is how I'm approaching it. Gee, I'm so surprised, V

To: abuelita who wrote (27221)	7/30/2000 9:49:21 PM
From: mrs goldberg	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 35685

Rose, did you say you had to water your pot plants????? Just me, Coonaz