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

To: Knighty Tin who wrote (96740)	7/20/2002 9:20:40 AM
From: Joan Osland Graffius	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 132070

Is anyone throwing out some low ball bids for Mondays market? I am thinking of throwing out some bids on companies I would like to own below the 1998 crises lows where I picked up some good companies cheap according to Graham/Buffett. Joan

To: Knighty Tin who wrote (96740)	7/20/2002 6:38:46 PM
From: Knighty Tin	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 132070

To All, Barron's Review. This issue was chock full o' nuts. 1. Abelson's column rips Alan Greenscam a new one. Never friendly to the Maestro (is that Italian for moron? <G>), Abelson lost his lunch over big dummy Phil Gramm's calling AG the best Fed Chairman of all time on the Senate floor. First, he runs the incriminating productivity chart since 1952 and the Miracle of Productivity is exposed as a total scam, green or other wise. Then he pounds on his often given advice that Greenie should have increased margin requirements many, many years ago. And he quotes Stephen Roach from Morgan Suckup that the frog colored said we were in a stock market bubble when the Dow hit 5874. But he was too cowardly to make the move and actually spiked the punch bowl he is supposed to remove when the party gets too rowdy. Now, Roach and Abelson claim that AG is inflating housing to save us from the downside of his failed stock experiment. It's nice to know that every workers' 401K was merely a guinea pig for the maestro to try to contain the cacophony of an orchestra of criminals and idiots run amok. I'm not going to tell you whose side I'm on. <VBG> 2. Andy Bary, who used to quote me regularly when he was at The Wall Street Transcript, points out that stocks are dirt cheap based upon T-Bond yields. Or is that T-Bone prices? <g> Anyway, his argument makes zero sense to me, though I like him most of the time. 3. Jeremy Grantham was interviewed. I have mixed feelings about the man. He says all the right things most of the time, but the funds he manages have never done that great. Not bad, mind you, but not great. This interview makes me understand a bit more why. First, he says to forget about regular bear markets. This one can only be compared to 1929, 1965-1972 and 1989 in Japan. I didn't understand that sentence and don't know if all those are Japanese bears or just 1989. I remember 1966 as being pretty danged good here and the crash not coming until 1973, so he must mean Japan. He says fair value on the 500 is about 25% below where we are now, but he expects the market to overrun fair value on the downside much as it did on the upside. The weirdest comment is about not liking gold because it has no yield. Fair enough. I could argue that ASA has a yield, but I get his point. Then he recommends buying timber. Uh, last time I looked, wood didn't have a yield, either. So, I think he both has some great insights and also shows some absurdities that must contribute to his funds performance. 3.A kissy-face story on CDWC. 4. More about the Fed and the bubble and the comparison of the US bear market to the Japanese experience. 5. Yet another bubble bit in the Market Watch section from a newsletter called Bubbles and Troubles. (Can't Willie Shakespeare sue these folks? <G>) This guy also concludes that Greenjeans has given up on the stock bubble and is concentrating on the housing bubble. 6. As Bill Gross gets more and more eccentric, it is nice to see smarter people cooling him out. I agree with him on GE, but his latest tantrum about short sellers and junk bonds were nutso. My former colleague, Margie Patel, took him down a notch or two in the Current Yield column. Basically, she says that hedge funds don't force cos. into bankruptcy. If they beat down a bonds price to where it's too cheap, she'll jump in and buy it. Unspoken, because she's a polite woman, is why Gross isn't bright enough to do the same thing. Buy low, sell high, Bill. 7. A great piece in Asian Trader on the cheapness of Asian markets vs. those of the US. Asian stocks are trading at 18 times with 20% growth for the next two years. Great piece because it agrees with me. <G>