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Strategies & Market Trends : Booms, Busts, and Recoveries -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: carranza2 who wrote (12253)	12/29/2001 8:06:41 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

Carranza, there are only 2% more people unemployed than three years ago. That's not a very big deal. Half of them would have been in debt and not spending due to wealth effect. Most people live hand to mouth and don't have investments to worry about [they have company pension plans but don't pay that much attention to them]. Their spending patterns won't have changed much because they had little wealth effect to spend, though the halo effect of full employment and surrounding wealth and confidence might have made them more profligate and run up more debt than normal. So I don't think there is a big problem with 2% more people unemployed. Spending patterns have shifted quite a bit. I'd love to see sales figures for Dom Perignon and first class fares to overseas vacation spots. I bet they are way down. Maybe unit sales are similar but prices might be down a lot to maintain sales. My spending patterns have changed quite a bit. Well, my intentions rather than my actual spending. I dare say a lot of other premium spending has been canceled by most people. The WalMart sales bear that out. With little change in employment, I can see that total sales figures won't drop much at all. Fuel costs are down so spending will swing to other things. That'll help hold down wholesale prices too. People are being redeployed from useless things [such as building McMansions and frivolous things which many rich people do who don't know what else to do with themselves when suffering Sudden Wealth Syndrome]. They are being re-employed on useful things, such as Tomahawk missile production, CDMA phone production and code writing, True BREW, car repairs instead of scrapping them because they have a full ashtray. Instead of sitting around retired, they are re-employed at reasonable pay rates on developing code for applications which otherwise wouldn't be done. They are redeployed from failed enterprises such as dot.gone to those which have customers and profits. It's good to have irrational exuberance over and done with, though it was a lot of fun celebrating Y2K like that. What a couple of years they were, the last of the 20th century and the first of the 21st. Phew! Now for some peace and quiet and back to the factory. On the worry about a grand finale Osama attack, if it's a real nuke, that would definitely be bad news [if it went off in downtown LA or somewhere like that]. But that risk seems to be unlikely [although some claims are made that they have a live one]. The smart money seems to be on a normal bang with radioactive contamination. That wouldn't be good news, but it wouldn't be much of a problem really. People would quickly go upwind or out of the airstream. They'd get firehoses out and wash everything down. Life would be back to normal in a week or so in the hot-zone. Radioactive contamination is not all that bad [in the quantities Osama could bring to bear]. Chernobyl involved a whole dirty great reactor burning for days. A little diesel/fertilizer bang with a few kilograms of uranium would make the Geiger counters click, but it would be no big deal economically. The media would love it!! Hmmm, I wonder who sent the anthrax? It certainly made news. Maybe it was rival news media who sent the stuff to competitors. They get revenge and a lot more newspapers sold. I often wonder, when I read of another virus being on the loose in cyberspace, whether the virus-hunting software merchants don't have a bit too much interest in plenty of viruses staying in circulation. Some unpleasant characters responsible for sales figures to keep their jobs might find it expedient to encourage the odd virus to rampage around the world. I sometimes wonder if the war on drugs depends on continued sales and it would NOT be a good idea from the drug-hunters' point of view if drug consumption became the decision of the person consuming it. The jails would empty out if drugs were legalized. I think consumption would drop too as they became less 'cool', unfashionable and thought of as for losers. People would decide that poisoning one's brain is not the smartest thing to do if it doesn't give street cred. Heck, even George W gave up the booze when he realized it wasn't getting him anywhere he liked. His daughter was trying it out, even though it's illegal for her to do so. Jailing people who supply children would be a good idea. Jailing adult dopeheads is not. But don't ask the drug law enforcers what they think about legalizing self-administration of brain poisons. Mqurice

To: carranza2 who wrote (12253)	12/29/2001 8:20:47 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

<Uncle Al will be forced to flood us with cash, and inflation will inexorably follow. Budget surpluses will be a thing of the past and W will have no choice but to begin to consider a tax hike--gotta pay for all those expensive bombs delivered half-way across the world somehow, you know.> Why a tax hike? Why not just ask Uncle Al to print a whole swag of new $1,000,000 notes and use those to pay for replacement munitions, fuel, repairs and maintenance? That would mean no tax hike. It would boost money supply which would reduce upward pressure on the US$. It would provide employment to people who are looking for work. The unemployed could be given a uniform and told to stand on a street corner in Kabul and shoot anyone who is armed and not an approved gun carrier if they refuse to hand over their gun. They could design a pipeline from the oil fields north of Afghanistan down to Pakistan's port. They could build it. The USA government could own it and use some of the profits to pay for occupation and political development of Afghanistan. Dostum could be given the job of defending the pipeline if he's looking too bored. Inflation is not something to worry about when a deflationary implosion is looking to be a possibility. Inflation can be sorted out if it ever happens. With more countries using US$ the demand must be growing a lot and more are needed to maintain supply and demand in balance. I bet they are acceptable in Argentina and Afghanistan right now and no doubt in Russia and a few other places - come to think of it, you can send me some if you like. The Euro is off and running next week. About time too! Since financial deregulation in Hobbitland in the 1980s, a lot of Kiwis have US$ accounts and a bit of cash in the top draw [in case of visiting the USA]. Mqurice

To: carranza2 who wrote (12253)	12/30/2001 1:09:59 AM
From: Stock Farmer	Respond to of 74559

Hi Carranza, >>You appear to be in the throes of Holiday-induced good will and optimism<< Actually, my apparent lack of perspective is merely due to a deluge of optimism from a few of the good folks on the happy threads. Recently I have been engaged in a battle of words with individuals who posted such stuff here as: Message 14663498 for example, and still demonstrate a similarly unquenchable optimism. Which debate has caused my tongue to lodge rather firmly in my cheek, if only to maintain sanity and prevent accidental blurting out of something altogether too rude to post. My more habitual stance has been like this: Message 15482184 And always with a long term view towards "perspective" ~ as in Message 15490992 To your various points, and to demonstrate some sanity. Yes layoffs are obvious and cash flow is far less conspicuous. Particularly amongst the recently (involuntarily) neuvo-idle-and-not-as-riche. >>No panic in Japan, simply silent suffering<< which silent screams are an unbearably loud source of cognitive dissonance. >>house for sale... will not sell<< You may be right. Sadly it is not the bank that will bite it, but the NAV of a very nice man and a good neighbor who had the misadventure of earning fame and fortune the legitimate (and much harder) way many many years ago, only to fall upon harder times in retirement recently. These are the real tragedies. >>only obscene margins<< Despite the fact that these three words should rarely associate with each other, yes, I was referring solely to the cup of coffee. As to your astute observation >>He's taken his shopping to Wal-Mart where he can really save a buck. << Right on point. Funny you should mention this. But I was there just before Halloween with my son looking for just the right goofy rubber mask, and again a few weeks ago scooping up strings of blinky-lights. On both occasions I ran into six-figure salaried software engineers in the aisles. And a few six figure severenced folks as well. The latter, I understand. The former... substantiates your point rather well. >>Wait 'till February<< Yes. Indeed. My favorite month for shopping. John

To: carranza2 who wrote (12253)	12/30/2001 3:50:07 AM
From: smolejv@gmx.net	Respond to of 74559

>>but we cannot ignore the possibility of further economic chaos caused by another terrorist incident. One of those and all bets are off. < Let's call this exogenous variable - Deus [or Devil] ex machina. It causes the economy, our psyches ... whatever ... cover our solar plexus with one hand and our family jewels with the other. Induced (like insulin-induced) coma. And after the shock everybody has a cake and can eat it too: "It was not me, it was those SOBs". J6P spent 2/3 weekends home watching soaps, without buying anything, 40% of Beamer dealerships in US have closed... You get the idea. It will have to happen one way or another, but the exogenous excuse (push) giving the drivers (AG, Shrubs ...) the chance of deniability. And it does not have to be too ...obscene. Oil at 30 for few months? Yen at 120 (to sell some XBoxes () in Nihon and, btw, Jay has some triggers set at this level;)? dj PS: If Im incoherent, pls chalk it up to a horrible case of a common cold. () "No, we aint dead yet - proud product of American manufacturing industry"

To: carranza2 who wrote (12253)	1/2/2002 7:34:26 PM
From: Jacob Snyder	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74559

re: shopping at WalMart is not a good sign: Our household has 6-figure incomes, a 7-figure stock portfolio, a cap gain this year well into 6 figures.......and we did most of our Christmas shopping at WalMart and Amazon. I shop there because of Price and Choice. There simply is no value-added at glitzy stores. Walmart is one of the largest users of computing power and bandwidth. They are an example of a New Economy company, who makes profits while keeping prices low, by the efficiencies that new technology allow. Their efficiencies would not be possible without the products made by EMC and Intel and Sun. Our jobs, like most American's, is in the service sector, and are very secure. Ooops, I'm forgetting about the new car and the new PC. So, actually, it was Dell and Subaru who got our money.