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

To: carranza2 who wrote (5998)	7/18/2001 4:14:31 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

<Don't the Chinese consider it a delicacy?> Yes [though like everywhere about groups of people, that's a wild generalisation - for example, there are plenty of Chinese vegetarians [I guess]]. Here is a recent item [as seen on TV here too] about growing St Bernards for food: uk.news.yahoo.com They have thousands of them being bred for food. They grow really big really fast. <BEIJING (Reuters) - The Chinese have taken a liking to a revered symbol of Switzerland -- the St Bernard dog -- but the Swiss are not flattered. Gentle giants famed for rescuing people in the Alpine snows of Europe, the St Bernard's size and docile nature have become a major selling point in China, where dog meat has long been a popular delicacy known as "fragrant meat". Driven by increasing demand to boost meat yields, dog breeders have been drawn to Saint Bernards because they are huge, resistant to disease and prolific, with annual litters of around eight to twelve puppies, double that of other dogs. In a promotional video, a state-run Saint Bernard breeding farm in the northeastern city of Shenyang praises the big dogs as perfect for breeding because they are gentle and don't bite The video boasts that investing in Saint Bernard farms is "more lucrative than pig farming and livestock breeding" and says that 48 breeding stations have been built in 10 Chinese provinces with a total of 5,000 Saint Bernards.> I suspect the squeamishness about eating dogs is because in the West, man's best friend is a dog and eating your best friend seems weird as well as cannibalistic. In a similar way, eating horses seems odd. I can say they are nice to eat [we ate them in Belgium]. Chinese presumably think it's weird to have an animal as a best friend instead of eating them. No wonder Jiang and W have the odd glitch of misunderstanding and conflicting intent. Mqurice PS: No, I don't eat my best friends. [Edit... I see CB likes Grubs [see previous post]. Incidentally, huhu grubs are considering edible in NZ - they are the larval stage of an large flying insect in NZ nelson.planet.org.nz You can see some happy KiwiKids having lunch at school in that link... they are being trained for when Jay's world financial crash comes - we won't starve.] More New Zealand food habits here: travelplanner.co.nz <Huhu grubs, battered snails, fried locusts, barbecued wallaby, drunken wild boar, brazed steer, water buffalo fillets, raw fish, marlin, shark, goat, possum stew...or curried burgers, stroganoff, or chocolate truffles laced with juicy earthworms and washed down with locally-made gorse or manuka wine... Hokitika's Wildfoods Festival - held on March 8 for the eighth year - is uniquely West Coast! (In fact, this year's New Zealand Event Management and Marketing Conference voted it the best in the South Island). I attended... Against a background of wheezy early-century accordion music by the ever-present Kokatahi Band - average age 70 - I sat on the grass under a cobalt sky, clutching a punnet of kokoda (Fijiian marinated fish) and a beaker of "Virgin Kiwi" iced tea. >

To: carranza2 who wrote (5998)	7/18/2001 5:47:27 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

Thanks for the reference to James K Glassman. Here's a link to Tech Central Station: techcentralstation.com Here's an excerpt from his "Dow 36,000" book. I think he has plagiarized my comments and ideas from 1995 onwards [when I first predicted Dow 8,000 by Feb 1998 and Dow 16,000 by Feb 2002]. He has got one thing wrong though. Alan Green$pan did NOT say there was irrational exuberance in the famous speech [which nobody seems to have bothered actually reading]. He implied it was difficult to decide if there is irrational exuberance, in the form of a question. It was not difficult in 1999 when stocks were roaring like mad, led by mass hysteria in dot.coms, which were obviously on the road to hell. But he had to simultaneously deal with Y2K which many people thought [serious people who understand things] there was a major risk that the Y2K bug could bowl the world over. He got a big stack of liquidity into the markets for Y2K, but then had to yank it back hard in 2000, when Y2K was the world's biggest fizzer, and to stem the irrational exuberance which was in full florid form in the stock markets [the dot.com sector as well as the Nasdaq in general and elsewhere to some extent]. So he raised interest rates until the squealing happened and the irrationally exuberant wealth effect was killed. When a pressure cooker is depressurized, it happens with a whoosh, so the steam went out of the dot.coms and Nasdaq, rolling down through the margin barriers, cleaning out the excessively margined and a lot more besides. What is impressive is that the collapse has been so smooth, despite being like a runaway train. It's impressive to me anyway, but I did expect he would succeed. I decided he would succeed before and since 1999 when I decided a market crunch was imminent due to dot.com and general mania, not to mention oil going from $9 to $30. I kept promising a collapse month after month, but it was resistant to coming but it did. But there has been no economic collapse. Things are smoothing out. The world is still stable. Financial systems are intact. Production hasn't reduced [in the USA anyway though some other countries are in trouble]. He lowered interest rates as fast as the train was running downhill. Now, there is no more Y2K to worry about. No more dot.com/Nasdaq irrational exuberance wealth effect. No more anything! Soon, he can start moving interest rates back up a bit as people start getting excited again as Dow 36,000 becomes the target again and the ghosts of 1929 and fears of a reprise recede into ancient history. Anyway, here's an excerpt from Glassman's book explaining why Dow 36,000 is reasonable [I'm sticking with my 16,000 because that's where my confusion starts - I'll think about over 16,000 another time, if we get to 16,000]: amazon.com I didn't know about Glassman until your link, so thanks ... it's nice to read. Mqurice PS: Here's Glassman in May 2001, still gung ho... aei.org Here's the actual Alan Green$pan irrational exuberance speech. federalreserve.gov Here's the quote. You can see how he was widely misinterpreted. I don't think he mumbles. I think people don't listen and have a sound-bite attention span. <...Clearly, sustained low inflation implies less uncertainty about the future, and lower risk premiums imply higher prices of stocks and other earning assets. We can see that in the inverse relationship exhibited by price/earnings ratios and the rate of inflation in the past. But how do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values, which then become subject to unexpected and prolonged contractions as they have in Japan over the past decade? And how do we factor that assessment into monetary policy? We as central bankers need not be concerned if a collapsing financial asset bubble does not threaten to impair the real economy, its production, jobs, and price stability. Indeed, the sharp stock market break of 1987 had few negative consequences for the economy. But we should not underestimate or become complacent about the complexity of the interactions of asset markets and the economy. Thus, evaluating shifts in balance sheets generally, and in asset prices particularly, must be an integral part of the development of monetary policy... > Note that what has happened with the dot.bomb is well within what he expected...