To: TobagoJack who wrote (41927 ) 11/22/2003 3:42:36 PM From: Maurice Winn Respond to of 74559 No, I haven't finished. Debt is a big deal in money dynamics. Debt is quite a magical property of money which enables the future to happen today. The greater the level of debt, the more of the future is being brought into the present. Predicting the future has always been a great dream of humanity. Gypsies have their crystal balls [in popular literature if not reality]. We have our crystal windows into cyberspace. Peering in, looking for clues to what's going to happen. The USA is the leader in enabling consumption today of tomorrow's production. Which is a very cool trick. No longer is it just a matter of a mortgage on the house. There are debt and financial instruments wall to wall; Wall Street to the Great Wall. Debt is not a problem. It is the solution. Of course, there is a financial Reynold's Number and all sorts of Money Dynamics IIIa issues which money engineers need to understand and manage for a successful monetary system. It's not good having a dam collapse due to pore water pressures building up as it fills, nor having a concatenating financial implosion as cascades of debt crash into each other as margin limits are broached at cyberspace speeds. Engineers know this. I agree it's disconcerting that the monetary experiments are being run real-time, without rehearsal, inter-linked in one giant financial system. Now I'm making myself nervous, so I'll stop that line of thought. Engineers do their research in laboratories and when the Ruahihi Canal collapsed, as I suspected it might, it didn't cause the Mississippi to dry up, the Pacific to freeze, the Three Gorges Dam to collapse, floods to drown millions and the ice caps to melt, simultaneously. Hmm, now I'm even more nervous. So, back on track. This wondrous debt mechanism keeps the whole process zooming along, lubricating the wheels of industriousness, production and efficiency. Wayyyy into the future. Think of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs as the dwarfs march off to the mine singing, "I owe, I owe, it's off to work we go". Debt keeps the workers working. Plenty of people have so much debt that they will be working until they drop. That's their choice. I don't mind people working. I think it's excellent. It means things are being done and will be done. If everybody went troppo, moving to bucolic Trinidad and Tobago, or Fiji, hanging out on the beach in a loin cloth, snoozing under a tree while the sheep munch grass, they might be happy, but they wouldn't be producing. We capitalists want production and lots of it. Now it's true that Globalstar had big debts and Long Term Capital Management had big debts and owned a good chunk of Globalstar and there were leveraged debts in a big daisy chain around the world, with Asian Tigers feeding on debt. Things were borderline when the three computers on board a Zenit rocket [converted from MIRV intercontinental ballistic missile sword to communication satellite ploughshare] got into a dispute as to whether things were going okay or not. Democracy isn't perfect and the wrong computer was shut down. The two ignoramuses took charge and the money engineer Uncle Al KBE had to very quickly step in and open the faucets to keep financial pressure sufficient to avoid breakdown of the elastohydrodynamic boundary layers, lubrication failure and a sudden and catastrophic grinding of gears, smashing of pistons, loss of propulsion and steering and collision with an iceberg in one titanic disaster. Dopey Mahathir blamed the Jews [Soros] but Mahathir doesn't understand engineering. He's a quack. Well, Bernie Schwartz is a Jew [I think] and he was in charge of Globalstar and they selected the Zenit, so maybe Mahathir is right. Anyway, Uncle Al, KBE [hmm, is he a Jew?] saved the day. Lugging water and digging gold might have been fine in China in 1760, but it's the 21st century Jay. Cyberspace, lingua franca, debt and amazing financial engineers are keeping the elastoquidynamic financial system humming along and improving it daily. I think the Q should be the Quid. 100 quid = 1 Quid = 1 share in QUALCOMM. Quid pro quo is fair exchange. The English have pretty much finished with the expression quid for their currency anyway. A quid in Britain isn't what it used to be. It's barely one stop on the underground! Now, it's still drizzling. So I'll get up and make a nice cup of tea. Mqurice