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

To: AC Flyer who wrote (41117)	11/7/2003 5:03:35 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Respond to of 74559

<How is it when we are so obviously experiencing an unprecedented increase in global wealth and prosperity that so many are convinced these are the worst of times. I don't get it. Please explain it to me, Mq!> In the same way that there's no such thing as "America", in the sense of "what's good for America", because it's really a country of about 280 million individual competing interests, the world is made of 6 billion competing people. What's good for one American is not good for another. Some things are universally good, such as clean air to breathe, but even that has competing interests because some will pollute for economic gain and others get no gain from pollution. Kelly Kameyer, a sier who came out to NZ in late 1999 on a round the world holiday from the USA with $6 million, killed himself earlier this year, having lost the lot and owing the tax people $1 million or so. We had a day trip up Rangitoto, the newest and biggest volcano in Auckland [600 years old only]. We enjoyed a celebratory lunch, with NZ's then richest guy sitting at the next table with his bunch of acolytes. Kelly had it made. He lived for a few weeks in Metropolis, a then brand new hotel, which was cheap and plush. He had a serviced apartment with a great view. He wasn't a happy person anyway, even with all the money, but the losses tipped him over. I know plenty of others who lost a lot of money during the bust. Not just paper money but actual hard-earned cash they'd saved. But even shattered expectations make some gloomy. I figure it's better to be a has-been than a never-was. I hadn't got adjusted to Sudden Wealth Syndrome before I was back to being just me, which is much easier. When you look at the market capitalisation reduction in Britain, USA and elsewhere, it's easy to see that a LOT of people had their nausages reduced. [Jay's nausages = net asset value]. A LOT of them were laid off from jobs which enabled them to scoff $12 drinks at Windows on the World at the top of the Twin Towers. Which have also gone, which leaves me with a sense of shattered hopes too, though I understand the actual loss of life and property was trivial in the overall context as viewed from outer space. Even the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Israel are trivial compared with other conflicts. We hear about the individual 10 year old killed the other day. The body counts are on one hand. Hiroshima involved a whole city. The Blitz involved a LOT of bombs. Casualties were in the 10s of millions in WWII and WWI. War, famine, pestilence and disease have been constant blights on humanity. A single child had to be really newsworthy, like Anne Frank, to rate a mention. I didn't see Hiroshima happen live. Nor the terror in Dresden or the horror of German Zyklon B showers. But I watched on tv as the Twin Towers fell. Standing in our rented house up on the hills over Paihia, overlooking the Bay of Islands on a day made by Lt General Boykin's champion idol, it seemed literally insane that what was happening on tv and therefore in New York, [where I have also stood, gazing up at the gleaming towers to the sky on a similarly beautiful day in 1976 and again in 1999 with our daughter Emily, enroute to the Biotelecosmictechdot.com celebrations at Telecom99 in Geneva], was contemporaneous with my immediate experience of the beauty of the Bay of Islands. If that sentence isn't too long! That shocked a lot of people. Television makes horror fairly immediate. So I'm not surprised at all that people don't realize that the Twin Towers, the Biotelecosmictechdot.com bust, the Saddam and Osama wars, horror in Bali and a bit of anthrax in the mail are so trivial as to be foolish to get too wound up about them. People know what their pension plan looks like now compared with then and it adds up to gloom and doom. Whereas, in reality, things are amazingly good and getting amazingly better incredibly fast. Overall. But not for Kelly and others who are experiencing things up close and personal. Most people in China wouldn't have a clue there was a problem with the Nasdaq. Just as few Americans would know there was similar carnage in the New Zealand stock market and economy back in 1987, when the big crunch in the USA was just a small V in a long upward graph. It's barely noticeable now but then it was very, very exciting. Plus, there is a lot of debt on houses and stuff and the cycle of recovery isn't complete and political stupidity is always possible. Interest rates have to go up and that's going to crunch a lot of home owners and debtors who think that they are entitled to low interest rates. There are still some shocks to come. But unlike Jay, I think the great and amazing Uncle Al and Uncle Sam will steer a steady course. There won't be a TeoTwawki any time soon. Unless a 5 kilometre diameter meteor splashes down and the huge tsunamis destroy everything around the Pacific rim [I guess up to an average of 300 metres - hmm, I should calculate the wave size for a hit near Honolulu by the time the waves got to me]. There would be waves bouncing around the Pacific for weeks as they reflected off the continental shelves and land masses. Where the waves interfere, the height would double. Even a mountain-sized meteor would make life in Los Angeles problematic. QUALCOMM is cunningly up on the mesa in San Diego, so they'd be okay. It pays to think ahead. Globalstar has a spare satellite and gateway operating control centre way up in the hills too. Those are my theories for the day. Mqurice

To: AC Flyer who wrote (41117)	11/7/2003 6:04:52 PM
From: elmatador	Respond to of 74559

A cumulative Boom happening side by side with a Bust is the obvious answer to the question: <<How is it when we are so obviously experiencing an unprecedented increase in global wealth and prosperity that so many are convinced these are the worst of times?>> IT is not possible to pin point a single factor. It is a million little factors working at once. But I leave those aside for the moment. A lot of old people in the OECD contries are concerned about their pensions and need the developing countries to pull out the world economy out of a Bust. While this is welcome, they fear that "dominance" will chnage to other side of the world they know very little or nothing. A lot of young people today in developing countreis don;t need Protestant ethics, be an artisan, be physically in Europe US or Japan to produce as much and in the most cases surpass the productivity of the people in these countries. These guys are much more cost effective than the average young people of the OECD countries hence jobs come their way.