To: AugustWest who wrote (12338 ) 1/31/2002 1:52:11 PM From: MulhollandDrive Read Replies (1) | Respond to I think the laxity that brought us to these valuation levels has disappeared as Fleck says in his Rap....and I think the unwillingness to accept such laxity going forward will make the overhead resistance that remains in the market so hard to overcome.grantsinvestor.com I'll warn everybody right off the bat that today's Rap will have more than its usual level of pontification on my part. Also, our usual format may not be the same as I try to cram a whole lot of ideas into one space. Hopefully, everyone will bear with me on this score. These seem like unrelated agendas, but I think that they have a common theme: They're all about ending an era of laxity, in which nobody asked hard questions as long as everything looked okay. That era is now over." this is the end of an era, much as the summer of 1982 was the start of an era of rising stock prices, prosperity in general, etc. That period ended with the complete lunacy, abuses and abdication of responsibility that we saw in the late 1980s, but the psychology never totally changed, even after the peak in March 2000. People continued to want to believe that we still were in a "new era." The Wall Street Journal continued to capitalize the words "new economy" (until recently), and people refused to give up. They seemed to think that stocks really were just pieces of paper they could trade for any price. But the Enron scandal has unmasked all of the various lies that went on for the longest time at a moment in time when the public seems to be receptive to what it all means. So, I believe that the Enron scandal is the end of the insanity and, as such, will have profound ramifications. During the late stage of the mania, I had a glib expression to characterize peoples' attitude toward corporate America: "We don't care if you lie. In fact, we love it. Just don't get caught." ...........
