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To: edamo who wrote (33979)	3/19/2001 11:22:49 AM
From: Jill	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 65232

Ed....I do remember you posting that repeatedly, about the stale #s, and I am sure you're correct. Greenspan is a dictator by some fiat that nobody conducted--I keep thinking how he was a student of Ayn Rand when young, and he probably has the mien of Ellsworth Toohey--how exactly would the Fed Govt topple him? He has taken so much power over the years It's interesting that when Bush Sr. was in office his popularity rating was so high until boom economy teeters and popularity plummets. I can see why the Republicans need to look at this as political gamesmanship--give us a few years of recession and definitely the democrats are back in power--I'm neither demo nor repub as everybody knows, I vote for the person I like I do believe Greenie knew. He thinks recessions are healthy, burn off the excess---- Our constitution was brilliant but nobody foresaw a Federal Reserve outside all checks and balances, eh? Flygal P.S. tongue in cheek here, but I shoulda bot rmbs on friday and scalped for 3 points this a.m.! One would expect a tehcnical bounce today before the fed tomorrow

To: edamo who wrote (33979)	3/19/2001 11:45:11 PM
From: FR1	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 65232

but the real responsibility is at the feet of the federal government who has the ability to control the fed reserve, and if required, abolish it with the sweep of a pen.. That's what I have always felt. Congress should at least tell (IN LAW) the FED that their job is to act only in an extreme emergency - war, international financial collapse, inflation that is clearly out of control. Otherwise they are not to raise or lower interest rates and let the market work. It is significant to note that not one single news source points this out. It will never happen because all 4 of the major players in our society do not want it to happen: 1) Congress wants to blame the FED if anything goes wrong. If they tell them not to act, the FED will constantly be blaming congress for tying its hands. 2) The newspapers love the idea of the current situation. A crisis every year. Suspense every day. It sells tons of newspapers and lots of ad time. If the FED simply kept out of the news and waited for an emergency it would be dull and boring. 3) Wall Street actually likes the FED. Most fund managers are restricted in what they can invest in by law. Consequently, most funds do 20 - 30%/year in a good year. If the FED was not around to kill the market every few years, people would all invest in high growth stocks and make the fund managers look like fools. In early 2000 mosty fund managers looked foolish. After the FED kills the economy the fund managers can all say "You see - it was a bubble and I am here to save you from that." 4) The FED won't quit doing this because they are all academics. Academics do not live for money. They live to have their superior intellect proved right. They want to be on the cover of Time Magazine with the label "Genius of the century". You can not be proven right if you do nothing. So the FED is constantly fiddling with the interest rates and then claming afterward that they were being proactive and saved us from a impending terrible fate. The FED assumes nobody will notice that they have changed their job description from "crisis intervention only" to "proactive intervention whenever your hunch says do it". Also note that there is no way that you can prove the FED wrong. When Junior throws rocks at cars and the cop asks him why he is doing it, Junior says "To scare away the tigers!". The cop says "There are no tigers around here!". Junior says "Yeah, thanks to me!!". The press and Wall Street, for the reasons above, always get around to painting the FED as a savior. They never point the finger at congress. It makes you feel like we are living in a kingdom in the medieval ages. IMHO this kind of structure can never last. We are doomed to repeat this FED cycle several more times. Eventually the FED will start one of its rate hike rants and everyone will move their funds to Germany or China and not come back. It will take another 10 years for them to get strong enough but it will happen.

To: edamo who wrote (33979)	3/20/2001 7:42:26 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 65232

Microsoft: A Gorilla with $27 Billion in Cash... ___________________________________________________ Monday March 19, 2:21 pm Eastern Time Forbes.com Microsoft's War Of Attrition By Rich Karlgaard <<Consider this pair of data points from last summer: Steve Ballmer began trashing Net stocks in his public appearances. Microsoft yanked most its corporate advertising from the Web. The last was especially suspicious: Microsoft (NasdaqNM:MSFT - news) had its own portal--MSN--to support and was keen to prove its "Net-worthiness" to skeptics. So, why would Microsoft debunk the Net in word and deed and risk looking old economy or hypocritical? Simple. Perhaps there was a higher priority. Maybe Microsoft decided to start a war of attrition. This time last year, Yahoo! (NasdaqNM:YHOO - news) was worth $96 billion, Sun Microsystems (NasdaqNM:SUNW - news) worth $150 billion, and America Online (NYSE:AOL - news) worth more than $200 billion. Against this inflated dot-com currency, Microsoft's $24 billion bank balance--a huge cache by any measure--was rendered strategically impotent. Microsoft was suddenly impotent in other ways--and not just from its smackdown by the Clinton Administration's Department of Justice, either. Between 1995 and 2000 Microsoft, like all older companies, suffered a brain drain. Young talent was migrating to the dot-com world. This loss was particularly galling to Bill Gates, who prides himself on his ability to recruit the best and brightest. (Gates once told me, in the early 1990s, that Goldman Sachs was his chief competitor. Huh? I asked. "Sure," said Gates. "We compete in the same IQ pool as the top investment banks.") Losing talent and watching cash decline in relative terms, it's my guess that Gates and Ballmer decided enough was enough--it's time to go to war against these troublesome dot-coms. But rather than launching a direct attack--a political and public relations nonstarter since the DOJ was breathing down its neck--the company stealthily set out to wreck competitors' currency. Classic! Brilliant! And totally expected, hatched as it was from the minds of those two 800-math-SAT-scoring chess masters from Redmond. Ballmer is out the next day trashing Net valuations. And back home, Gates gets the word to the Microsoft ad department to stop all of its corporate advertising online for the remainder of 2000. Gates knows such Microsoft cooling on the Web would give license to chief executives around the world to cut their Web advertising, too. (Gee, if the brilliant Gates is doing it) And that's precisely what happens. This Microsoft strategy--and it's only a speculation--came to fruition last week when Yahoo! shocked Wall Street with sales figures 25% below estimates. Yahoo!'s market value immediately sank to a three-year low of $7 billion. Microsoft's cash balance, meanwhile, rose to $27 billion. Translation: Microsoft could buy Yahoo! for pocket change if it wanted. The dot-com plague has spread to Net infrastructure giants like Oracle (NasdaqNM:ORCL - news) and Sun--the two hated Silicon Valley rivals of Microsoft who funded the legal assault that began in Palo Alto, Calif., five years ago and wound up at the Clinton DOJ. Sun is twice damned: its stock down 70%, and half its employees with options underwater. Meanwhile, Sun's beleaguered sales force is vainly trying to extract profit from its new severs. From California to Virginia, these slick boxes must compete against thousands of year-old boxes from hundreds of dot-com liquidation sales. Boy, has that shut up Sun's Scott McNealy for awhile! Come to think of it, if you're Gates and Ballmer, you couldn't have planned this little Web Armageddon any better. Cash is king once more, and Microsoft wields $27 billion of it. Talent is fleeing back to Redmond. The once uppity Yahoo! goes begging for white knight. Sweetest of all, those loudmouths Larry Ellison and McNealy have been gagged for a season. Bill and Steve couldn't have planned it better.>>