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

To: NOW who wrote (43370)	12/16/2003 12:44:14 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

You are of course quite right that perception and response are what matters. I myself have responded to the fear and thereby changed economic behaviour. I fear the crazed Americans so haven't visited the USA for fear that they'll have insane security stealing nail clippers or randomly harassing people [me]. We even have it here at Auckland airport [required if aircraft are going to visit here]. So nail clippers are confiscated whereas large bottles of flammable ethanol are not. A large bottle of Vodka would make a much better club than a nail clipper would act as a box cutter. After breaking the bottle of Vodka, it could be ignited with a cigarette lighter or match [easily carried on board] and hey presto, a good little fire on board the aircraft. Break three bottles and it would be a conflagration. Some inadvertent comment about bombs or anything would be considered a terrorist threat and I'd be carted off for a body search and general harassment and maybe Guantanamo Bay. I might have the wrong name. An elderly civil engineer was gaoled for 3 weeks in South Africa at the behest of some moronic FBI agents because he had the wrong name. Not for me thanks. But this doesn't mean there's good reason not to invest. It means investing should account for irrational fears. Investment in security camera manufacturers or bomb sniffers or chain mail undergarments or kevlar helmets would be a good idea instead of investing in airlines. Invest in superconducting trains instead of aircraft. Or whatever the investor thinks is the right thing to supply irrational people with goods and services. In the middle ages, it was good to invest in brooms for witches and stakes to burn them at. Now it's anti-terrorist fear-factor supplies. Except that I don't really think there's much to invest in in that regard. I think that really, the impact on people's lives is trivial and what they really do is not a lot different. See the Hummers humming, the cyberphones chirping and the malls crowded. Houses are bought and loans made by the umpty $billion. Aircraft are full [finding a seat the other day for an international trip was tricky - Xmas day was all that was available]. I think people enjoy a bit of terrorism. It puts some drama in their pathetic, boring, lives. The Romans had the Colosseum and gladiators fought to the death in it and any gladiators who did NOT fight to the death were soon put to it. Listen to the mob disdain Saddam for not stupidly shooting at heavily armed soldiers. It was probably difficult to fight back when a little banger was dropped down the hole or some gas blown in to slow anyone down who might be in there. Now the slavering mob wants him put to death. Now we have the dramas on television - saves leaving the couch and getting stuck in traffic and the parking around the Colosseum would be horrendous these days. See Saddam hunted and captured by the imperial Roman forces. See his sons go down in a hail of bullets. See the Bradley tanks zooming around and watch the AC130 Spectre spray thousands of bullets over an area, mowing down terrorists by the dozen. Life in the cubicle, stuck on the freeway, queued in the mall for a detergent blue light special, with safety worries everywhere and rules for everything and nothing permitted is a fairly humdrum life, alleviated only with some Prozac, a gin and the excitement of the hunt as Saddam, terrorist number one, is dragged from his little hideout. Few Americans would know that for decades, the USA was all in favour of Saddam, supporting him and providing weaponry galore, encouraging mass-murder war with Iran, conning him over Kuwait, turning a blind eye to his cruelties. He served their purposes then. If I remember rightly, the USA disapproved of Israel bombing his noocular weapons production plans back in 1981. Now they come over all faint at the mere idea of weapons of mass destruction. It's all grist for the investment mill. Mqurice