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Strategies & Market Trends : Booms, Busts, and Recoveries -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TobagoJack who wrote (1868)	2/8/2001 4:00:19 AM
From: ms.smartest.person	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

Hard landing: fable or fact? This is all about our busted Internet dreams By Thom Calandra, FT MarketWatch.com Last Update: 7:48 AM ET Feb 7, 2001 NewsWatch SAN FRANCISCO (MKTW) - This is the tin drum, the hollow Internet scenario the bankers should have been reading a half-year ago. This is about the sewage that fills the Internet pipelines. It is atmospheric, moody. None of it is entirely true. None of it is entirely false. This is about Gulfstream jets that Internet executives bought for spare change, then ditched at half-price when their companies missed a quarter. This is about margin calls for day-trading CEOs and CFOs. About wake-up calls from auditors. And about multiple shareholder lawsuits. This is about San Francisco peninsula office space renting for half its level of six months ago. About lay-offs. Dwindling wealth. Waning portfolios. Cars and homes repossessed. Manhattan apartments losing 10 percent of their value each passing month. The gold rush is over. This is post-Klondike, when the carpetbaggers split town in a hurry. Doesn't matter where you are -- San Francisco, Tokyo, Sydney or New York. The dance halls are empty. No one is buying the Opus for dinner. Traffic is light on the freeways. "You can get that upgrade at the airport, sir." The hotels are half-full. Concierges sit around, dawdling. The fitness clubs are dusty, unused. Construction stops. Fiber-optic lines lie exposed in half-dug ditches, abandoned. Workers are afraid to go home with their pink-slip news. "Baby can't go to private school anymore, dear." This is the old western where the wagon circle gets tighter and tighter. Where the new economy becomes the blue economy and the old economy gets even older. Where even hard-working code writers, engineers and biomedical researchers must follow harsh IRS tax-repayment plans. Where executives leave their companies for "family reasons." Or jump ship three times in a year, searching for a steady paycheck. This, my friends, is the hard landing that has yet to be discounted by financial markets. It is the Tuesday evening Internet gathering attended by a hundred or two zombies. Or the energy crisis that spreads like wildfire across an entire western coast. Benchmark companies miss their numbers for the first time in half-a-dozen years. Inventories pile up. Horse-manure terms like "end-to-end solution" lead only one way - to a dead end. There is a full moon this evening. If the clouds break up in time, you'll be able to see the shadows of ships on the water: the big ships at the port, loading and unloading their vast containers. They're filled with dreams: cameras, computers, hand-helds, mobile phones, TVs, Porsches, Harley-Davidsons, fine wine. Great inventory for great times. Somewhere in the night, there also will be sounds and smells, like that hollow tat-tat of the tin drum. Or the smell of flesh burning. Let's hope and pray none of this becomes entirely true. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Thom Calandra is Editor-in-Chief of CBS MarketWatch and FTMarketWatch.com. app.marketwatch.com