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Technology Stocks : Cisco Systems, Inc. (CSCO) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RetiredNow who wrote (55459)	9/19/2001 12:50:17 PM
From: Eric	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 77400

MM I was talking to my dad this morning who is still heavily invested in the markets and we were discussing how back in the 1950's most mom's stayed at home and raised the kids. My brother and I were fortunate to have a mom that stayed at home. It isn't that way today. A lot of mom's are in the work force. The discussion then moved to discretionary spending. Back then a lot of folks didn't have a lot of free cash flow with only one wage earner. Today we have a lot. TV came out in the 50's and we had a new medium to market products to the masses. The Jone's factor came into play and the advertisers succeeded in convincing us that we need to buy toys. Mom and dad started buying toys and they realized that mom had to go to work to stay on the "train" so to speak. Sorry to ramble on here but just move from the 1950's to today. Much more money (and our time) is spent on a lot of things we don't really need. Since we all pretty much agree that 2/3'rds of the economy is driven by the consumer you can see that we are much more vulnerable to a slow down. Is this going to overshoot? Sure looks like it now. Not everything is at value levels but I'm starting to see some incredible bargains. It all rests in the lap of the consumer. Our government will be critical here to determine the length of the economic decline. I'm still optimistic but that is tempered with reality. This thing is starting to feed on itself. It wasn't doing that a few months ago.