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Strategies & Market Trends : ahhaha's ahs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ahhaha who wrote (5692)	12/7/2002 2:02:19 AM
From: ahhaha	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24758

With respect to taints of old crowds our man Robert Bartley had this to write the other day: Risk Aversion in the Corner Office The economy won't grow again until CEOs start taking chances. BY ROBERT L. BARTLEY WSJ OpinionJournal Editor Monday, December 2, 2002 12:01 a.m. EST I had lunch the other day with the head of an organization that holds shares measured in hundreds of billions, and dinner with a man whose business is buying companies outright. Both worried at length about the same thing: a CEO class seized by risk aversion. Assessing the "soft spot" in the recovery in his most recent testimony, Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan noted, "In the business sector, there have been few signs of any appreciable vigor. Uncertainty about the economic outlook and heightened geopolitical risks have made companies reluctant to expand their operations, hire workers, or buy new equipment." At a Fortune forum, former GE Chairman Jack Welch put it pithily, "There is too much hunkering down." A "large proportion of our positive activities depend on spontaneous optimism rather than mathematical expectations," Keynes wrote in his General Theory. "Most, probably, of our decisions to do something positive, the full consequences of which will be drawn out over many days to come, can only be taken as the result of animal spirits. . . ." The recovery has been lackluster so far because businessmen have lacked animal spirits. To join the consumer in boosting the economy, businessmen need to take prudent risks. You never know for sure whether your new product will succeed or your new investment will pay out; no economy can prosper unless businessmen are willing to take these risks. ... I find this odd because Bartley in the past believed that it was a natural process for businessmen to take risk as long as synthetic and unnecessary impediments were not erected to hinder them. Now he says that they have erected their own impediments. The 'crats created barriers at the behest or demand of the people, but now the wall is being torn down. So businessmen have no excuse and Bartley only is imagining where they would hide, if it was only natural for them to do so. Bartley can't have it both ways, so like Lehrman, or Ture, or Roberts, or Friedman, he's just getting old.