Hi Alex, In brief, nothing except total fascism in Washington or domestic warfare with mass-destruction will stop or even have much slowdown of the economy towards full employement and prosperity in a couple of decades. That means an X-times increase in both GDP and stock indices per decade.
As far as your question of market ramifications near-term -
Market tomorrow: don't know, but sold 30% as of last Monday after 50% gain since Oct., and w. sell 30% this coming week or two, until we digest the relatively big gain already taken, and bears start crowing a bit louder.
Ramifications next year: imo excellent starting Q1 or Q2 for selected small-cap tech in telcom (such as WCG, GX, ELON, ALGX), e-commerce/venture(VINA, LDP), biotech (tbd), and opportunistic plays when time permits (VWPVX,MAXF,VSR) selected from SI and other threads, 50% Gains, LastShadow, Rat dog, The New Economy, Stock Attack, etc.)
Beyond that, since you asked, to prove my dotty raver credentials: I'm an unrequited believer in a steady and dramatic uptrend in both technology and the economy at an exponential pace, with the occasional correction when things get stupid, like 1999/2000.
More verbosely -
Meanwhile the next two years will require a damn good dance among financial powers that be, but they seem to be getting better at that, even if Greenspan gets replaced by Rubin or someone equally credible. The reason? Disclosure, such that even an in-crowd major donor to GWB like Lay of Enron gets exposed (altho' he'll probably get to keep a few hundred mill, instead of being jailed like he should, it still warns others, like CPA firms, to play nice.)
Anything to worry about? Anything that would have allowed an Enron to get away with it, such as the fascist state now being planned behind the Beltway, which may someday be able to clamp secrecy on almost anything considered subversive by those creative minds, which if you're Mr. Lay, could have been the "national security of Enron's world's largest energy trading system is at stake!!!", or some such tripe (and gee, btw, here's that $100 million for the next election, thanks so much, you great American you). So, in a word, political trends towards fascism can kill the economy, by distorting capitalist signals that keep things on track.
Full disclosure in everything in government and public business is the antidote. We don't have that yet, and we're temporarily going in the wrong direction, and if we lose more of it then, Katy, bar the door, invest in gold, canned goods and ammunition. I'm only sort of kidding.
The pace of innovation has, and will continue to accelerate, because of our interconnectedness over the web. If you haven't noticed, we are all absorbing ideas faster, and as a community are responding faster, and (here's incurable optimism again) better, with a few exceptions (like aformentioned Big Brotherism, politics of death, noise in the media, attempts to control the internet, and such).
FWIW, my particular take on this subject started a couple of decades ago with NSF project on the ARPAnet, along w. a philosophy paper comparing the breakthrough of Socratic dialog 2,000 years ago with collective network/human intelligence emerging today - the idea being just as philosophy evolved to solve problems synthesizing new ideas of the politics of the city-state and in science then, collective network-assisted intelligence is evolving to solve problems of species annihilation by new technology today. The conclusion of that starry-eyed college kid and the battle-scarred adult today is the same: in spite of bumps in the road needed to assimilate political and economic potholes, we're are being self-directed towards unimaginable success as an economy, and as a species (see? I told you it was starry-eyed).
Bottom line, yes, the future's so bright I gotta wear shades.
That's whay I think, anyway. |
