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Non-Tech : Deflation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Worswick who wrote (348)	4/3/2007 10:58:30 AM
From: Maurice Winn	Respond to of 621

Thanks for the thought provoking commentary. The exogenous event does seem to be under rated by people who operate on relatively short time frames. Which is most people most of the time. But I think exogenous events aren't really exogenous but are just part of how things work and don't even have to be an event. People like collecting in groups and forming what seems like mass epilepsy or brain fevers aka mass hysteria. Ideas take hold somehow, in an osmotic process, and zoom around the world. People like to be in herds and stampeding is part of herd behaviour. Even without any actual event, the humans will collect up into a herd and then stampede. Perhaps when one imagined they saw a leaf move and their twitch made the next one more nervous and the next accentuated the move and in seconds the herd is panicked and stampeding, or, in if not stampeding, acting in unison on some idea or other. People like stadiums and big crowds and cheering. They go on a haj and surge in huge numbers around a rock. In Antwerp they have a haj around the church bells during summer. People will form a crowd spontaneously, for good or ill. If the idea takes hold that there is some financial panic, we will have nothing to fear but fear itself, but that's more than enough hazard for a herd of buffalo or a stampede of humans. In 1999, I wondered whether the coming biotelecosmictechdot.com bust would turn into such a self-imploding cascading collapse as counter-parties failed and markets didn't clear and a financial black hole formed. I had decided that Uncle Al KBE would do as he did and that things would go as they did. But I did think it would be less of a trough and not take as long. Nor did I foresee the huge stack of debt leveraged onto houses around the world. Now that load of debt also has to be rebalanced with the irrationally exuberant housing "wealth" brought back to Earth. So far, so good. Though the process hasn't even started in New Zealand - it's still going in the mania direction. Australia has been long into the housing price reset process. The USA has now been a year into it. Over a year. So far so good. The counterparty derivatives on derivatives prediction industry has yet to be tested [other than a few skirmishes such as the Long Term Capital Management debacle. Mqurice