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

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (12254)	12/30/2001 12:27:42 PM
From: Stock Farmer	Respond to of 74559

Mq ~ fear of fear itself, yes We return to Cognitive Dissonance again with your <<perhaps the mere presence of the fear will avoid the very thing which is scary>>. In lay terms, "fight or flight". Unfortunately there is a third response in the middle ~ that of paralytic constriction. And so <<With many people positioning>>, there are many others frozen in place. Clinging for the LT to their previous B with a tenacious H. It isn't that <<people are perhaps removing the very forces which propel the problems>>, precisely the opposite. Take Enron. It wasn't the debt that got them, nor the double-entendre book keeping, but a sudden fear in the hearts and minds of others to sit on the other end of the teeter toter with them, for fear of big Enron falling off and sending them smashing to the ground. So instead it was Enron's tailbone that broke on ground contact. The end was not avoided, just redistributed. It's not <<It's the surprises which get us>>, actually it's the end that gets us. Which also depends on the open ended definition of "us". For example, one end versus another are somewhat equal from the (posthumous) perspective of the endee. It is the "us" who remain unended who are affected differentially to any meaningful extent. And in the example you cite, this "us" was no less surprised in the end. <<Y2K had potential to create vast mayhem>>. Yes, and to an extent, it did. The <<taking countervailing action>> you mention merely shifted the problem. So it wasn't a bunch of computers turning the clock backwards that got us. Instead we enjoyed a bloat of IT departments everywhere, whose previously essential employees found themselves suddenly useless on the eve of Dec 31 1999 and spent the last two years scrambling trying to justify their existence. Many failing. That and five years worth of depreciation & repurchase crammed into 18 months, masquerading as a sustainable growth and sold to the public at the hands of uneducated extrapolators. So instead of a painful and sudden "ohmygosh, pull the plug and get it over with", instead we get to endure half a decade of the cure and its collateral effects. Hmmm... No, we won't have a great collapse. No "Poof", as you described it elsewhere. Just a lingering pffffffffffffffft. Where we do agree is here: <<If we see a scary monster coming from a long way away, humans tend to find a solution. >> Sadly however, most humans see monsters in closets and under beds where they aren't and fail to recognize the monster with the odd shoes in the seat beside them on the plane. Allegorically speaking, of course. Clearly it's time for me to brew some more mind numbing tea. I may need to lay in a stash for the long haul. John