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

To: TobagoJack who wrote (21236)	7/15/2002 5:38:01 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74559

<(a) Asian values of family, education, work, savings, and meritocracy is not worse than other values of econo-political cronyism, TV, speculation, home equity loan, and sound-bite electioneering, again and once more;> Jay, what do you mean, Asian values? The dominant Asian value has been the medieval European approach of servitude to the ruling class. The individual as a mere cog in the proletariat serving the state. The British invented freedom, habeas corpus and all that good stuff and it was British values which made Hong Kong the economic powerhouse it became. Americans adopted the best of the British freedom concepts and that has stood them in good stead, despite constant erosion of those original liberties into the current parlous state. I guess you have noticed that Hong Kong is not so pre-eminent now that China has got it firmly back in the grip of Asian values. Hooray for Chairman Mao, Long Live Jiang Zemin, Zieg Heil!! Japan adopted, to some extent, democracy, education, capitalism and other western values. So did South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore. India kept the old-style western Marxist socialist bureaucratic values with an overlay of religious rule and it shows. The point is, that any community can copy any values they like. Memes surge and shift and countries rise and fall as they adopt or abandon the paradigms of success. They can be small, like Singapore and New Zealand, or large like China. Success is not a function of size [consider India and Singapore as examples]. China is trying to repeat the old-style mode of success, which will work very well, up to a point. But already, they are self-limited because they have a chimpoid dominance hierarchy approach which will not work in the polyglot 21st century world of cyberspace and mind to mind exchange of value. But your point is correct - those fundamental values of humanity will beat the old-style chimpoid political cronyism boss-style, Aztec speculation, TV-numbing, and thinking by slogan and sound-bite. But it'll be a long and arduous battle. Meanwhile, cheap US$ is entirely sensible. Interest rates are a function of demand for the money and you and I are not surprised that I am NOT keen to borrow a big heap right now, therefore the price of money must fall until it gets surging around again instead of hiding under mattresses. Uncle Al will keep the squeeze on until those, like me, holding money, figure out that they had better go and buy something because it's doing nothing sitting in the filing cabinet, bank account or pocket and meanwhile we are all getting older and will die without spending it if we don't hurry up. Easy money is fine. Also, Uncle Al might as well print a whole lot more because if you and I don't want to go shopping, he might as well print a bunch for GeorgeW and co to go shopping - the shops are full of stuff and people are wanting to produce things to earn money. As we get diluted, those holding money will gradually get nervous that their money is losing value and they'll in the end have to go shopping. Oh, speak of the devil, Jay has gone shopping: <BTW, I have put in an order to buy one platinum watch worth of this company on the London market: > Interest rates will be raised - I'm surprised they haven't already done it, as you say, to reward savers and avoid whiplash back into irrational exuberance. Mqurice