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Politics : Ask Michael Burke -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Knighty Tin who wrote (94503)	2/14/2002 6:08:56 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 132070

I saw an interesting phrase this morning on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, one I hadn't seen before, and certainly not in that august location: "The Economy formerly known as New". They owned as to how all the productivity gains of the the '90s were looking a tad mirage-like. What does that make Greenspan, The Fed Chairman formerly known as Maestro?

To: Knighty Tin who wrote (94503)	2/15/2002 11:37:47 AM
From: Bill Cotter	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 132070

KT; Help! need course in Economics 101. Is this true what they say about the huge JPM derivative? "At a time like this, it is easy for the average investor to breathe a sign of relief. Phew! That crisis is over, now things can get back to normal. The only problem is, that the problems are still there. JPM still has a $29 trillion dollar derivative book (Grant's). (It was down 4% today) That's five times the value of the U.S. economy. Japan's banks are still going to cap the insurance on bank accounts at $75,000 in April. The bank in runs in Japan haven't started yet, which is only to say that they've been put off a little while longer." depression2.tv My impressions are that, although the Internet bubble burst, the after-shocks are still effecting telecom, wireless and fiber optic. Telecom; These companies are up to their eyeballs in debt. WorldCom (WCOM), Qwest (Q), Nextel (NXTL), Williams Communications Group (WCG) are in very competitive situations. They either overestimated the number of potential subscribers or are not charging enough for services. This is creating a telecom bottleneck. Its like the food chain. I hope it doesn't become a house of cards. The guys up top have put a freeze on capital expenditures, this in turn, is effecting their suppliers like Lucent (LU), Cisco (CSCO), Foundry (FDRY). The Internet itself; I am a mainframe software developer. The general public has no idea of the high costs associated with developing a system. There is the design, project management, software development, testing, de-bugging, documentation and support. This is just the software side. Companies are feverishly working on their web sites, trying to maintain a competitive edge, but I don't think they have taken the time to figure out the costs associated with this effort. Take for example, our friend Silicon Investor. It is free! Who is paying for the software (pretty darn good) and the hardware (thousands of messages stored and retrieved daily from servers)? I don't think the advertising revenue will be sufficient. What about all the other free stuff we get, research reports, all kinds of charts, stock quotes, instant news, etc.. What about the discount brokerage houses. How can they continue to survive with their $5 and $10 stock transaction fees? There must be tremendous pressure to keep systems up and running 100% of the time during market hours. This usually means maintaining some sort of tandem system which would double computing costs. I guess what I am trying to say, is that the costs associated with doing business on the Internet, are going to continually weigh on the economy until companies figure out a way to pass this along to the consummer. Scot McNeally of Sun Microsystems (SUNW), said that there are another 10 bankruptcies on the way. The hardware equipment from these companies winds up in the grey market. The glut in this market is having an effect on his company's sales. Sorry to be such a doomer and gloomer, I guess I've been surfing Silicon Investor too much.