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

To: tradermike_1999 who wrote (7226)	8/16/2001 12:31:06 AM
From: Maurice Winn	Respond to of 74559

TM, Sure, you are quite right. Green$pan controls a very limited range of economic forces. He can only fiddle with money supply, interest rates and talk to other central bankers. Economics is a vastly bigger field than the measuring stick used to keep score. A business is a matter of ideas, energy, drive, love, fun, co-operation, persuasion, hope and the like. The bottom line is just the current scorecard. Alan only controls the length of the measuring stick. Whether a block of land is measured in yards, feet, inches, metres, deflated dollars, constant dollars or any other measuring stick, there is an objective reality which doesn't vary. The value of the land is not a function of the measuring stick, it's the value people put on it. The size of the block is a real thing, independent of the measuring stick used to measure it. But, an odd characteristic of economic systems is that they can grind to a halt if people run out of inches to keep score and measure it. The supply of measuring sticks needs to be kept large enough to supply the economy. Since the measuring sticks are ductile and represent the value being transacted, it's a bit like measuring the universe using time and distance - when the time and distance are defined by the thing being measured, it all gets a bit self-referential. I am because I am. That place is a light-year long, even though we think gravity has shrunk it to the size of what was a graviton previously. Something measuring itself is a very tricky, slippery concept. As the monetary measuring stick, which also is used to transact the economy inflates and deflates, our perspectives tend to get bamboozled because we fixate on the numbers rather than the human values hidden behind those numbers. But we all tend to have a 'will I go to work for that number' figure in our heads and THAT is the true value which money represents. Maybe that's a bit of blather, but it confirms what you say. He only controls the measuring stick which is also the means of transaction. People have to still want to buy, sell, work and produce. I don't think people have given up on family, learning, earning, saving, investing, spending and fun. Whether they use gold, sea-shells, US$ or euros, they find a means of fulfilling those drives. Alan's job is to maintain a robust system, a solid score card, a consistent measuring stick. That's all he can do. The rest is up to us. My premise is NOT that he controls all the gyrations. But he can, by matching the inches to the market, keep things steady and avoid irrational exuberance [when sheeple think they have found a huge cache of free inches] and irrational panic [when sheeple think all the inches in the universe are shrinking beyond the event horizon into a black hole, never to be seen again]. That's the theory I work on, for good or ill, Mqurice

To: tradermike_1999 who wrote (7226)	8/16/2001 11:56:52 PM
From: tigerman77	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

i agree greenspan is in a bit of a fix...he can choose to save the markets or support the dollar.....trouble is he cannot do both...the bond traders knew this and called his bluff......now he is running out of bullets ....the falling dollar will lead to an exit of foreign equity.....a collapse in the stock market and greenspan will be fired by congress or will retire........mutual fund redemptions will also be worse this year$$$$