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Strategies & Market Trends : The Epic American Credit and Bond Bubble Laboratory -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ild who wrote (10411)	3/18/2004 3:01:16 PM
From: mishedlo	Respond to of 110194

that was denied by the MOF. M

To: ild who wrote (10411)	3/18/2004 3:11:02 PM
From: ild	Respond to of 110194

Date: Thu Mar 18 2004 14:18 trotsky (@al-Zawahiri) ID#377387: Copyright © 2002 trotsky/Kitco Inc. All rights reserved it would be an important catch, if it really is Zawahiri. he's the crown prince, and ideology commissar of the turrsts, and a figure of both high symbolic and strategic value. it would be an unqualified success in terms of the war on terror...so it's no wonder that the markets react to such news. however, such an event can probably not keep the markets from going to where they were going to go anyway. all market moves of earlier today were solidly based on perceptions about economic fundamentals shifting a touch. the unanimity of the bullish consensus looks a tiny bit frayed at this stage. there's no alarm yet however. this afternoon i've seen an excerpt of a debate between 2 presenters and two guests on CNBC Europe. one of them was apparently a US fund manager , and i was struck by his steadfast adherence to the bullish consensus, completely unperturbed by evidence to the contrary, and simply evading questions that implied e.g. the potential for criticizing the Fed. a bureaucratic underling in the old Soviet Union couldn't have done a better job of sticking to the party line. i.e., only when people are afraid of the siberian gulag can they be expected to be comparably dependable in the ideological purity department. an 'is the Fed a serial bubble blower' question simply elicited no direct response for instance. arguments were presented as to why one should buy stocks. no, the word 'value' wasn't mentioned, to be on the safe side presumably. so why should one buy? it's the '$2 trillion sitting in money market funds' , THAT's the reason. so basically, there's a guy urging people to buy partial stakes in businesses, not because they can be had for cheap, or because the outlook for those businesses is particularly exciting, but because 'there are $2 trillion sitting in MM funds with nowhere else to go'. no-one was mean enough to point out to the guy that the Japanese bear market of 13 years was accompanied by the biggest pile of money sitting in MM funds yielding nothing that the world has ever seen. as an investment philosophy, it strikes me as the type of thing you would expect from a US fund manager, who is on average sitting on the lowest percentage of cash vs. assets in history. he HAS to hope that those MM funds will somehow switch allegiance. even if only they have 'nowhere else to go'. this overlooks that they already ARE somewhere else of course. the US fund buying public can't be accused of stinginess in any case, it has just provided the third highest monthly mutual fund inflow in history in January, a contrary indicator btw. the view from Europe is less sanguine. evidently, Steven Roach's missives have at least left an impression. they're not IGNORED as if they didn't exist. the deficits, the mutliple bubblitis and the dollar are all viewed with growing apprehension. compared to the presenters at the US version of the program you feel like you've landed in bear central, although objectively speaking, it's more a case of trying to at least appear neutral, as opposed to engaging in shameless cheerleading. on the whole, it appears as though complacency still reigns...the consensus on Wall Street remains largely undaunted. but the sound produced by the small choirlet of dissenters has turned a notch more audible. the evil dudes from the caves are only an ancillary , transient item in this context.