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To: Knighty Tin who wrote (132697)	11/3/2001 3:27:12 PM
From: Haim R. Branisteanu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 436258

Other Russian connection ........ and OIL from Central Asia nytimes.com

To: Knighty Tin who wrote (132697)	11/3/2001 5:31:49 PM
From: James F. Hopkins	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 436258

The reason I roped in the Russian Mafia is because of an FBI report. It appears the Russian Mafia has them baffled and is very different than any Mafia they have ever dealt with. Look at the system they evolved in, the Government owned every thing worth stealing. They became experts at keeping books & ripping off their own Government, the top dogs turned out to be professors and accountants with degrees from their best universities. Most are multi lingual and can blend in and mix with other Mafia types with ease. ----------- While our right wing hawks like to take credit for the demise of the old Soviet Union the reality is that it was the Russian Mafia who did the job. The CIA was so grateful they rewarded the slickest of them with U.S. citizenship.. <G> There has never been a Mafia like the Russian one, it evolved in spite of Stalin and even the KGB. Our CIA and FBI are like cub scouts compared to these guys. You can count on one thing for sure, they very much distrust government , and are not going to sit back while the hawks over here push for giving the right to the president to order the assination of anyone he wants. I don't think they like the idea of star wars, and they will play ball with terrorist if for no other reason than to prove it's insane. They came right out of the Gulags to tear Russia down and they arn't scared of shit we have. In fact they think our prisons are like resorts to rest up in. <G> Jim Jim

To: Knighty Tin who wrote (132697)	11/3/2001 7:50:19 PM
From: ild	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 436258

IMO this is right on the money about resiliency in consumer spending: Carl: I had dinner last night with a psychologist who talked about how the stock market was acting like a person with post traumatic stress disorder. In PTSD, people often over-spend immediately following the tragedy. She had a lot of examples. Women who are assaulted often go over spend on clothes, people who just survived an automobile accident will often buy a very expensive car. The idea is that you just suffered a loss and are entitled to "buy" your way out of it... That you can make up for the psychological loss with material things. Generally speaking, this just compounds the problem. She believes the market is doubly traumatized, first by the NASDAQ's crash and then by the events of September 11th. If the market follows the human model of PTSD, it will be experiencing a "grieving period" where it won't want to buy anything and the market will again go down. The beginning of the grieving period may begin at any time and could be triggered by another assault. EDITOR: This is a very interesting comment as I look at my personal actions following 9/11. At first I was shell-shocked, but then I went on a spending spree, which I would characterize as being motivated by a fatalistic sense that there may be no tomorrow. This kind of mechanism may explain the unusual firmness of consumer spending in the last month. Certainly the stock market is a massive psyche composed of the individual psyches of all market participants, and there could be a fatalistic recklessness behind the rally from the September lows. I'm a lot more comfortable with that explanation than I am with the assertion that the economy is going to turn on a dime and begin another 10-year upswing. decisionpoint.com