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

To: TobagoJack who wrote (27258)	1/10/2003 11:15:16 AM
From: Maurice Winn	Respond to of 74559

Jay, a lot of people would like to suffer like Americans. They'd love to have 50 kg of fat to lose. They'd be thrilled to have a 10 year old car with air con. Wow, $3 an hour just to run around a restaurant waiting on tables. Life is easy in J6P land. <A few days ago, as President Bush was polishing his plan to bolster the U.S. economy, Denver restaurant owner Rito Luna put an ad in the paper seeking a server. It was pretty typical stuff. Part-time, $3 an hour plus tips. Six hundred people replied. Six-zero-zero. That was just the first few days. Before Luna ran out of applications and started scribbling names and phone numbers on sheets of fax paper. Before he turned off his cell phone. > One of my sisters has just come back last night from Vietnam. Sometimes she would go extravagant and spend $2 [NZ$] = US$1 on a meal, including tips. I've tootled around India [well, you don't 'tootle' in India - travel is arduous, crowded, dirty and dangerous]. We could buy delicious mangoes, cashew nuts, tuktuk rides around town and most other stuff for a small amount of money. I believe many people's daily pay is something like US$3 [including tips]. Waiting on tables probably earns less than that superior salary. In Kiwiland, I've heard a tourist walking away from a restaurant, chatting on his cellphone to a friend about how cheap the meal was. In living memory [like a year or two ago] my daughter was waiting on tables for NZ$9 per hour x 0.4 = US$3.60 an hour [there are no tips in NZ - well, a few crazy foreigners tip a bit, but it's pooled and after a month the staff might buy a block of chocolate to share or something]. Yes, I understand that $3 in the USA is barely a loaf of bread whereas here, we can buy actual real delicious bread for US$1 [or $0.80 on a good day], so the $3 goes further. But with tips included [at 10% of the bill] I guess the waiter would be getting more like $9 in practise. What it means is that Uncle Al can print a LOT of dollars as long as Vietnamese prefer to accept US$ in exchange for goods and services. While China is expanding production, turning out thousands of tons of goods and services per hour in exchange for Uncle Al's pixelated love, he can enjoy the best money tree that's ever existed without inflation. While India is waiting in the wings with 1 billion people, I expect the process to take decades. It seems quite reasonable that Americans, Vietnamese, Chinese, Indians, Japanese and Kiwis be paid the same rate for the same job. It has remained a puzzle to me over the decades that people accept democratic political systems which keep them at the bottom of the heap [such as India]. They can literally vote themselves rich. Unfortunately, dumb Kiwis think they can vote themselves rich but don't know how to do it, so they actually vote to go to the bottom of the OECD league and fall off the table into third world status [from number 1 or 2 position 40 years ago, with a near-zero crime rate to boot]. The USA should expect continuing equilibration with the rest of the world. It's a GOOD thing. The tide of humanity is a powerful force, if slow. Yes, it's 5 am and I'm going back to bed...zizzzz.... Insomniacly, Mqurice

To: TobagoJack who wrote (27258)	1/10/2003 11:31:15 AM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

If we have to blame one man and one only, ..... We don't have to and can't. People often like to blame somebody else, rather than face their own defects and accept responsibility for themselves and their own decisions. There's not much as obscene as a Ku Klutz Klan mindless lynch mob on the rampage, gonna lynch that damn Greenspan coz it's all his fault... Now, I gotta go... Mq

To: TobagoJack who wrote (27258)	1/10/2003 11:33:49 AM
From: Maurice Winn	Respond to of 74559

10 x $38 = $380 not $352. Gold better get a move on. Mq

To: TobagoJack who wrote (27258)	1/10/2003 7:08:21 PM
From: AC Flyer	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

>>And yet, as CB and ACF would note, growth is 2-3+%, productivity is rising, and lots of folks are getting jobs, there is no banking problem.....so, therefore, everything must be just fine<< Yes. >>as we drop past the 18th floor ledge, powered by gravity<< As to this, I have no idea where you get it - perhaps from the mind-bending effects of experiencing the mainland-ization of Hong Kong first hand. The 1990-1991 recession was worse than the one we have just experienced, with higher unemployment, higher white collar job losses and a so-called "jobless recovery" that dragged on into 1994. And yes, as you point out, the banking system is in far better shape than it was a decade ago, mortgage delinquencies, foreclosures and consumer credit charge-offs are about where you'd expect at this point in a slow recovery. The enormous prop under the US economy is boomer demand - that's why consumer spending has held up so well - without a collapse in aggregate demand there will not be - can not be - the kind of economic collapse the doomsters have been forecasting for two years now. There is no reason to expect anything other than what is the de facto highest probability outcome for 2003 - slow economic recovery and a shift in investor psychology that will at some point drive the equities markets sharply higher. At this point the zombies will desert gold and $350.00 gold will be seen for what it is - a zombie-driven spike on the inexorable path to $250.00 and lower.

To: TobagoJack who wrote (27258)	1/10/2003 8:52:40 PM
From: pogbull	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

<<My guess is Target Stores will not last the Storm of the Century>> Evidently you missed this: <g> Store Closing Notice - All K-Mart and Wal-Mart stores will be closed in Iraq as of January 20, 2003. They will be replaced with Targets. On a more serious note, do you have a US$ target for the POG at which point you would be selling gold bullion or equities?? I had been thinking longer term 2006/7 that $1100 to 1400 was possible. But lately some of the better known gold experts are saying $3000 is possible by 2010. A few of your posts from a few weeks ago referenced $6000 but, I assumed you might have been joking. Thanks for your posts.