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To: JF Quinnelly who wrote (49)	3/22/2001 9:55:39 AM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 443

The understanding I am struggling for is how much of the decline in total market cap has to do with the process you just described and how much it has to do with cash being taken out to the system. As I type the question I can see it's not the right question but I can't figure out the right question. The reason I am asking the question is that I keep reading and hearing an estimate of how much money has been lost in the aggregate by the bursting of the bubble, basically people who are just looking at the total market cap of the Nasdaq, which is meaningless, and they say stuff like "it's $40,000 for every man woman and child in the country, my God how are we ever going to get over this?" And I know that's the wrong way to look at it but I can't figure out how to say it. I was monitoring this on a daily basis in October, by adding up the total market cap of the closing price of all stocks trading on the Nasdaq, NYSE, AMEX and OTC exchanges. As the Naz declined, the others went up so my conclusion was that there was mostly rotation going on. The total US market cap didn't change much. For example, the total I got on October 13, 2000, was $15,997,442,690. Recently I added up the numbers again. On March 18, 2001, total US market cap was $13,159,321,000, so first of all, that's only $3 trillion, just a little more than $10,000 for every man woman and child in America, although "only $3 trillion" is a lot of money. There are two separate processes going on. If A buys a share of stock in the morning for $100 and it drops to $50 that afternoon, the guy A bought it from has $100 in cash and A's lost $50. B, who bought another share of the same stock ten years ago for $10, hasn't lost anything, the way you explain it. Is there any way to tell how much of that $3 trillion was A's and how much was B's? Or are they both in the same boat? It's all unrealized wealth that just depreciated away.