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

To: Snowshoe who wrote (21524)	7/21/2002 9:25:20 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Respond to of 74559

Snowshoe, I think the 'retirement' crisis is really a financial crisis for those people who were wiped out, rather than a retirement crisis. Whether one is retired at 20, 40 or 100, being wiped out is bad. Of course, at 100, it's not normally so easy to get back into the earning business, having little in the way of ability left. I have had a couple of retirement crises, having retired at 40 [apart from a cowardly couple of years working in the early 1990s just in case]. I was nearly wiped out in the Zenit-caused, Globalstar inspired Long Term Capital Management implosion and related Asian Contagion woes in Korea. But I looked on the crises as financial crises, rather than retirement crises. But then, I suppose it's a matter which term is driving the need. Since freedom is the goal, I suppose it is most accurately a 'freedom' crisis rather than a 'retirement' or 'financial' crisis. As our great and wonderful hero, Uncle Al points out, [or was it J K Galbraith], most of the productivity miracle was converted into consmer benefits and lifestyle improvement rather than profit. Competition saw to that. Of course the greatest beneficiary was Uncle Al his employer, Uncle Sam, who could print untold amounts of fresh US$ without a hint of inflation appearing, because the technological and productivity miracles were causing rapid price drops across all products; by ensuring a tsunami of fresh $ to the US Treasury, great spending power by the US government could be enjoyed without the usual inflationary havoc. Now, the chastened shareholders and creditors of said telecosmic cyberspace companies are revaluing their assets at what profit will actually be left over after competition has done its work. Meanwhile, GeorgeW, flush with cash and an amazing array of technological revolution military equipment, can afford to conduct wars across the planet against any and all comers. I'm a fan club member of a world government and had thought we'd get it by way of the United Nations. But since people [Jiang Zemin, Putin, Blair, Clark, Chirac, and the multitude of other opinion leaders and political leaders and the world's public] lack the imagination to leverage the existing format into something useful, I'm happy enough, for now, to have the USA act in the role [though they are not offering democracy and are taxing without representation and ignore habeas corpus for aliens and consider collateral damage when dealing with aliens as 'normal' if undesirable]. Mqurice