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

To: TobagoJack who wrote (20818)	7/6/2002 8:48:11 AM
From: smolejv@gmx.net	Respond to of 74559

"...profit-starved and bad-risk companies ..." and states between A and Z - isn't letter U somewhere in between as well;} Honi soit qui mal y pense... dj

To: TobagoJack who wrote (20818)	7/6/2002 5:45:35 PM
From: Raymond Duray	Respond to of 74559

COLLASPING EMPIRES AND THE JOY OF SOUND Hi Jay, Two items for you today.... 1) Re: leading to collapse of empires and such. Here's an intelligent discussion of the limits of America's hegemonic powers: foreignpolicy.com Wallerstein was also on C-SPAN recently for a one-hour interview. It's available at cspan.org Use the video search box in the lower LH corner. Search for "Wallerstein". I watched it last night. Very well done, and it shows the remarkable anti-intellectual bent of the hawkish American Right. """"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" Now for something that is an order of magnitude more pleasant. Here's a link to one of my favorite streaming channels on the Web. musicsojourn.com Wonderful, innovative and delightfully sophisticated sounds from around the globe... Enjoy! Salaams, Ray

To: TobagoJack who wrote (20818)	7/6/2002 6:42:43 PM
From: Raymond Duray	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 74559

Starbucks and America, Inc. WHY DOES EVERYBODY SUDDENLY HATE AMERICA? America -- the markdown sales begin...... telegraph.co.uk Why does everybody suddenly hate America? By Alice Thompson (Filed: 05/07/2002) <Selected quotes> It started at the Gap Kids' sale. The prices of dozens of pairs of dungarees and jumpers had been slashed from £25 to £8. At first, I was suspicious. Why had no other parent bought them? They weren't fluorescent orange. Then I saw it - they had the Stars and Stripes embroidered on them. No problem, I decided: I'll just unpick the flags. But as I began to hack away at them yesterday morning, I started to wonder. Why are parents now happy to let their children's faces be painted with the St George's Cross, but shun anything that shouts "America"? It was Independence Day yesterday - the United States was on high alert after September 11. Yet in the 10 months since the terrible salami-slicing of the World Trade Centre, we have become increasingly anti-American. A book published yesterday is called Why Do People Hate America?. amazon.co.uk Can you imagine a book called Why Do People Hate Arabs? or Why Do People Hate Jews? The author, Ziauddin Sardor, says we should be disgusted by this avaricious country, which spends enough on pet food alone to meet the health and nutrition requirements for the world's poor. British tabloid newspapers can be equally anti-American. The Daily Mirror called on its readers to "Mourn on the 4th of July - for the victims of George W Bush and his bid to control the world". Our cousins across the Atlantic are accused of biting into our literary prizes with their perfect teeth. We're terrified they'll win. They're blamed for giving us sex in the city by exporting lap-dancers. Even their cowboys are no longer worthy - look at the head of WorldCom with his jeans, John Wayne boots and £2.5 billion accounting hole. All the faults of the Western world are blamed on this breed suckled on Big Macs. Martha Stewart, America's mummy, has been pilloried in Europe because she may have slipped a small pinch of insider trading into her recipes. At least Nigella Lawson's builders only defrosted a seminal piece of Britart, by unplugging a blood sculpture in her kitchen, we say smugly. The American journalist Joe Klein has been touring Europe and writing his diary in the Guardian. He was shocked by the anti-Americanism of Gap-wearing children on the Continent. Yet most writers in the same newspaper have been crowing at the "demise of Anglo-Saxon capitalism". That something is rotten at the heart of corporate America has been discussed by five different writers in a week. Americans can't win. They're hated by Jean-Marie Le Pen as well as bourgeois Parisian men who swing their handbags at them. Brussels technocrats, led by Chris Patten, sneer at them over their moules and superior frites. The only thing the European Union agrees on these days is its dislike of America. A friend who owns 10 pairs of Nikes summed it up: "They're obese, their food is obese, their ideas are obese, they're suffocating us with their huge bottoms." Yesterday, a banking friend, ordering a Starbucks Frappuccino and blueberry muffin, agreed: "They're too dim and introverted even to understand football. I couldn't get the World Cup on any channel when I was over there." <Continues online.....>

To: TobagoJack who wrote (20818)	7/7/2002 3:16:51 AM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

Jay, hello again. I expect interest rates to rise in the absence of inflation as measured by consumer price indices. The guiding factors are more likely to be: 1... Maintenance of US$ as the pre-eminent global currency Uncle Al will not allow the US$ to be relegated to an also-ran, which means returns on holders of US$ must be competitive with other financial transaction methods [such as the still to be born, and will not be still-born, Q cybercurrency, the Euro, the Yen, the Kiwi and other such major currencies]. 2.... Value of people per hour as measured in US$ [global people] The traditional CPI measure of inflation is confused by hedonism, hedonistics, hedonics and zero marginal cost software services, leaping and bounding cyberspace and such confounding variables. Money is primarily a measure of a person's time. The US$ is a global currency, so the value of a Standard Global Person is a better way to standardize US$ than a motley jumble of goods and services and abstract values. People are puzzled that there isn't inflation following vast printing of more US$. That's partly because there is a burgeoning global population bidding their time at lower prices to get some of those highly desirable US$. There are lots of other things happening too, such as Argentines [and me] having a little stash of the stuff instead of our local dodgy dosh. 3... Unreasonably low interest rates now so must go up. Uncle Al is well aware that the current incentive to earn and hold US$ needs to go up. 1% or 2% is not sufficient reward to people to accumulate US$ to earn interest at those rates. He will increase interest rates as soon as he can to avoid building up distorted expectations for too long in the borrowing crowds [who will dig in too deeply with risk of financial crunches when the increases happen]. Allowing irrational exuberance about the low cost of money would be as bad as the irrational exuberance in the telecosmic dramas. We have now had over two years of market clearing. So far, so good. Yes, there looks to be some more to go, but a very small proportion compared with what's already happened. I don't believe Uncle Al is in the slightest worried about the level of the Nasdaq, Dow and S&P500 - he just wants the markets to not be complicit in any structural financial hazards [such as was caused by the 1990s irrational exuberance which he tried to stem by raising interest rates to hefty levels]. So shareholders should not expect Uncle Al to be sensitive to their investment hopes. He is there to defend investment returns on US$, not on shares because that's the only way to maintain the US$ as the world's dominant currency. He will raise interest rates as soon as he thinks he can get away with it and if it causes some more crunching in stock markets, he will not be sympathetic, provided said crunches are of the order of 10% or 20%. The crunching will of course be in the companies with debts - Microsoft, QUALCOMM and cash holders with sound, expansionary businesses will go up. I have waited 6 years for this. As usual, it has taken 3 years longer than I expected for the hordes of people to get to where I thought they'd be back in 1999. As you often repeat, world reactions are a slow process; a relentless grind with a very gradually dawning of what the heck is really going on. Human reaction times are measured in years! I imagine that I'll be buying and borrowing to buy when Uncle Al starts increasing rates. Debt is a LOT of fun. My gains and losses would have been far less exciting without the added drama of leverage. Mqurice