Thanks NYCB. How many of the 20% have got another job? I suppose their new jobs are at lower pay. My point was that although there are layoffs, there is so much fat in employment demands [as shown by the still low unemployment figures and the still high salaries] that we can't really say we are anywhere near a financial collapse.
If your friends have only got the picture over summer, and are belt-tightening, that shows a very languid pace of collapse.
I don't think there is a collapse. I think the dot.bomb and telecosm collapses were spectacular but manageable in the context of 6 billion people with a Gross International Product of $$$Umpty trillion - don't forget to add the black market and barter activities.
The dot.coms come into the category of pocket money. Not to the investors who lost their shirts of course, but in the overall context, it was a new big thing. The investment in dot.coms was a bit like the approach DNA development takes = all possible mutations are tried and those who find an ecological niche continue, the carcasses of the others are recycled.
This whole drama is really all part of the Y2K bug and millennium hysteria. Several things all came together for a Y2K Big Bang celebration of the end of the biological era and the beginning of the new cyberspace era, where humans become merely the mitochondria for the new entity.
Globalisation
The crescendo of population explosion
The telecosm
Cyberspace
Democracy
Millions of technological developments
Reduction in socialism
Capital accumulation
The big driving forces haven't reduced one iota. They have increased. The big driving forces are romance, babies, hunger, fun, curiosity.
The redeployment of people involved in the dot.bombs is well under way. The adjustments in who owns what are substantially complete - check the share price graphs of Global Crossing, Globalstar, Boo.com, Yahoo!, Amazon, L M Ericsson, Nortel, Motorola, NetZero, Network Appliance, JDS Uniphase, Loral, Superconductor Technologies, 724 Solutions, CMGI, Cisco, Foundry Networks, 3COM, Lucent and others.
You will see a common trait to the graphs, which all include mass hysteria in early Y2K and then a rapid decline as people realized the earth was not a different place before and after the millennium. The sun comes up and goes down. Sometimes it rains and sometimes it's sunny. Life goes on.
Those graphs are all rounding out in the near-zero range [compared with their peaks though some still have substantial market capitalisation]. There is little adjustment left to make.
Even if they go totally to zero, the residual market capitalisation is trivial compared with the peak. The economy has handled the most stupendous change in history of who owns what with barely a murmur. That change has already happened. Those losses are already 'baked in' as they say. There is little left to manage. Since the vast transition was handled with ease, we should not be too worried about the tidying up which remains - there is very little left to do.
People have quit their day-trading jobs and gone back to work for The Man, on an 8.30 am to 5pm basis. They will earn their money with their nose to the grindstone, shoulder to the wheel, back to the wall and ear to the ground [they are contortionists]. They will pay their mortgages, they will pay their taxes, they will send their children to school, buy groceries [at a supermarket, not in first class on a 747 flying to Bali], put off upgrading the car [or SUV], check their bank balance [which will say 'you owe us $$$'] and defer retirement for a few more years or decades.
The Telecosm and dot.bomb collapse is over. It's finished [bar the shouting]. The financial system took it in stride. There is no financial collapse.
Japan, Hong Kong and other places which supplied the frenzy with Lexus and ready capital will have to earn their living doing more prosaic stuff like making and selling CDMA products which have real long-term value.
Now, the good bits of the Telecosm and dot.coms will go on to glory and be instrumental in creating the huge abracadabra which is burgeoning for all to see who are not blinded by the little roller coaster ride down we have all enjoyed with white knuckles and sickness in the pit of our stomachs.
USS Enterprise is steaming ahead - the irresistible has no matching immoveable. The sky's not the limit. It's an inflationary universe - there are no limits. [A little irony there too, just for fun].
Jay is standing there, immoveable, holding up an Aztec Cross to stop the irresistible. USS Enterprise is headed right at him, with 30 knots and a LOT of momentum. Uncle Green$pan is stoking the reactor, raising the nickel zirconium rods to really get things cooking.
Is Jay immoveable? Was it Jay standing alone in front of the tanks in Beijing, bringing them to a halt? Will he be able to do it again? Will USS Enterprise be as sympathetic as the tank driver? Could the driver stop even if he knew Jay is in the way? A tank and USS Enterprise are two very different beasts. The tank had a driver. USS Enterprise is a mindless, heartless, juggernaut. Uncle Al just controls the level of the rods in the reactor - he's not steering.
Mqurice |
