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Technology Stocks : Intel Corporation (INTC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Road Walker who wrote (143910)	9/21/2001 1:47:55 PM
From: tcmay	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 186894

The smart money is selling out to the patriotic sheeple Yes, the market is dropping like a rock...and yet the pollyannas called me a "negativist" a few days ago. Further comments after the excerpt below: --begin article excerpt--- Dow Headed for Worst Week Since Depression By Denise Duclaux NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stocks slumped at midday on Friday, leading blue chips to their biggest weekly drop since the Depression, as fears over a long war on terrorism after last week's deadly attacks overshadowed an upbeat earnings outlook from bellwether General Electric Co. (NYSE:GE - news). ``We are outside the historic envelope,'' said Paul Cherney, a market analyst at S&P Marketscope. ``No one knows when we will bottom.'' Investors dumped shares for the fifth straight day after hijacked passenger planes slammed into the World Trade Center in New York's financial district and the Pentagon (news - web sites) near Washington and claimed thousands of lives ten days ago. --end article excerpt-- A couple of days ago someone was saying my negative comments had been shown to be false because there was some minor afternoon rally (not an overall increase, just things not as bad as they had been earlier in the day). And some of you were saying it was the duty of patriotic Americans to buy stocks, to buy on Monday morning. Those who did have generally lost. As I noted, and now as others have noted, the institutions have been dumping their shares on the sheeple and the blissninnies who "showed the flag and bought stocks." While I don't know if things will get as bad (AMD $6, Intel $15) as they could get, they seem to be getting bad very quickly. The bailout of the airlines is a horrible, terrible thing. (Yeah, I know that to the blissninnies here this sounds "callous" and "harsh.") The bailout is horrible for the reasons Tucker and others have noted: it rewards bad business and punished good business. It rewards United and punishes Southwest for being such a sucker as to to not overextend itself. It's as bad as the S & L bailout. It may be worse, because it does nothing to help (nor should it, of course) the thousands of ancillary businesses feeding off of airline travel: the maintenance companies, the restaurants, the hotels, the travel agencies. People aren't travelling. Planes are at 20% of capacity. Businesses are cancelling trips. Dell cancelled its fall conference, Apple cancelled its European expo. Vacationers are cancelling, choosing to drive or not go at all. And these are rational decisions. Giving airlines money to staunch their losses makes things worse. In the best case, they continue to operate routes, thus possibly paving the way for eventual increased traffic. In the worst case, they use the $15 billion bailout to fund their golden parachutes, to allow for ways for them to sell their stock (no doubt to "patriotic Americans"). The facts are simple. A sea change in attitudes toward airline travel has occurred. Partly this is fear of further terrorist incidents, partly this is fear of a deep recession, and partly this is a realization that entirely too many "Dell Fall Expo" and "Intel Product Forum" bullshit trade shows were happening. Do 400,000 people really need to wander around in a daze at the COMDEX show in Las Vegas in a month or two? Probably not, and I would not be surprised to see attendance fall to one third of normal, if the event is not cancelled. So, who's going to bail out the Conference promoters, the big convention hotels, the rental car companies, the taxi drivers, the restaurants, Hollywood, television? American Airlines and UAL get rewarded by a grant from the public treasury. Justice in America. And the patriotic sheeple are saying "We should buy stock to help the economy, Martha!" Meanwhile, the smart money is getting out. --Tim May