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Politics : High Tolerance Plasticity -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: MetalTrader who wrote (8815)	9/28/2001 10:18:15 AM
From: kodiak_bull	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 23153

Kiss September goodbye today. Is anybody sad to see this miserable month come to an end? I see the discussions have begun in earnest as to where the bottom might be found in the OSX. This morning Willie Brown was on CNBC saying that San Francisco hotel rooms were at 30% occupancy and the airport is empty. Flip to a reporter at the Holland or the Lincoln Tunnel and you see vehicles backed up for an extra hour or two. Now click on the remote and find a clip of GWB promoting trips to Disneyland and I think you get the idea. The 9/11 bombers took out about a million square feet of high end office space, caused about $15 billion or so of direct property damage (4 planes, 2 buildings) killed over 7,000 innocent people and closed airspace and the markets for about a working week. But. But. When will we get to the end of the chain of knock-on effects? Out goes the surplus, out goes 21 years of national wealth building and in comes a total reliance on the consumer to refire the economy by visiting malls and theme parks. Harvey Pitt is changing the securities laws every couple of days to bring in the punters. One of the scariest moments (repeated, unfortunately, several times) was the seemingly serious discussion by people who ought to know better of whether or not short selling should be disallowed. These are points of discussion for the Bangkok Stock Exchange or the Shanghai Stock Exchange or the TSE, but from the 1980s. To even contemplate propping up your exchange by such means is frightening. What could be next, a mandatory 30 day holding period for stocks? How about just outlawing put options? Back to oil. A simple and imo misguided metric is the price of oil. The idea that, somehow in 1998 because oil at $10 equaled an OSX of 45 would translate to the firm belief that today's oil in the $20s or high teens would HAVE TO bottom at a higher OSX is wrong. I don't know how far we go back to find valuation metrics for oil and gas service companies to figure out where this one will go, or even if we do go back if the metric will fit. This is (worldwide recession, inventories filling, consumer hunkering down in his bunker, large number of rigs out and at work, large numbers of employees manning the rigs, OPEC holding the spigot open) a complicated situation. Last time we had a bottom (1998) we had: employee layoffs, producing well shut ins, huge cold stacking AND warm stacking of rigs, big inventory builds. Compare and contrast. Pay the cashier and take your chances. Kb