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

To: jim black who wrote (6038)	7/19/2001 5:51:38 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 74559

Jim, it all looks good from the Kiwiland point of view - ; Message 16097711 Things can't get worse than that! Maybe 72% of boomers want to retire at 60, but those two numbers are meaningless. If boomers want to retire at 60, they would have had to start thinking about it and doing something about it a couple of decades [or three] ago. That's a 'wishful thinking' goal. As you rightly point out, the USA savings rate isn't that great. But really, who cares? It just means they will work until they drop and that's no bad thing. Savings don't really matter at all. It's production which matters. Produce it and they will consume [at a price]. There are plenty of people like me around the world who are saving, building Globalstar, QUALCOMM and the like. The non-savers can work in our facilities and make great software until they are 95. Retirement is a modern concept. An experiment. Many retired people don't really retire anyway, they just do different things. Look at Bernie Schwartz, blazing away, having a lot of fun. Irwin Jacobs too. Retirement is only good if they want to escape the chain gang on the production line. If they haven't understood or chosen to do something to ensure that escape, they'll stay there until they drop. Optimism is the natural state of the world. There is only life and life is inherently an optimistic state. The assumption that things will get worse is inherently wrong other than in the short run when an accident happens, such as borrowing levels leaving the immutable financial laws Jay mentioned. Some people are perpetual pessimists [and that's good if they are skilled in identifying failed economic brakes, financial steering or technological blunders]. I hasten to add that 'thinking positively' seems a mental illness to me. Thinking positively is different from optimism but perhaps this is being pedantic and semantic. By 'thinking positively' I mean that silly state where clueless people think that by telling themselves it's all okay or they can do it, they actually can. Hmmm, this isn't clear, so I'll stop, because thinking positively in the sense of having the confidence that problems can reasonably be overcome is another way of saying optimism. It depends on the meaning people give the words. It amuses me that people think I'm some nutty cock-eyed positive-thinking optimist. Me who worries and expects comets, financial failures, volcanic eruptions [at Taupo], thievery, wars, ice-ages and wheels coming off the system. But I do think all these things are manageable. Problems and needs are our opportunities to do good things and make a lot of money to satisfy our own needs and avoid our own problems [some of which, such as incoming comets, are shared universally]. I know we can always make things better. Sometimes, such as with Globalstar, the effort put into making things worse is so great that they succeed. But once the failing ideas are gone, that's it, because, like Gambler's Ruin, or Margined-out losers, once you are out, you're gone and the successful way of doing things can happen. The bad ideas, DNA, technologies, ways of life, get filtered out of the human sphere by the relentless, immutable, laws of nature. New owners with different ideas will take over Globalstar. It will then succeed. Similarly, the margined dot.com mania buyers who bought at Nasdaq 5000 have experienced evolution first hand. The wheels are still on the system. Margin debts are way down. There has been 15 months of Nasdaq deflation which is sufficient time to allow a lot of financial adjustments [which are still going on as people adapt to more realistic values for stocks and their personal circumstances]. That's my theory, Mqurice PS: I suspect Bernie Schwartz is a positive thinker rather than an optimist. He was in good company with Globalstar. Notice that the cock-eyed optimist Mq was predicting Globalstar failure 3 years ago at the prices they planned and that we should panic beforehand and slash prices to ensure success. My lonely, negative, pessimistic, loser voice was ignored by the optimistic, positive-thinking, euphoric, irrationally exuberant, baying mob.