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

To: Snowshoe who wrote (70692)	10/27/2008 3:12:06 PM
From: Maurice Winn	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

Snowy, I can see why people live longer than other creatures = there's a lot of advantage in being long in the tooth, sage and experienced. I'm not surprised by this. I have seen 1974, 1987, 1998, Y2K and now this which were all big busts. Plus I have good hand-me-down memory of the Great Depression from my parents who lived it [and WWII]. This is a biggie with more chance of greater carnage than all of those combined because of the global scale and integration of people. During the Great Depression, life was agrarian, rural and there were only a billion or so people living largely subsistence lives in bucolic harmony. That's an exaggeration because living in trenches in WWI was hardly happy with millions dying at the end of rifles and bayonets in mud and dysentery. But my point is that countries and towns were less globally integrated so if trade broke down due to political stupidity, the consequences were less than if things break down now and conflict starts. With umpty hundreds of millions of Chinese moving to cities to supply a vast export industry, it will be a big mess if the exports stop. Same for Japan, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and a lot more beside. What provides sustenance in Mexico City for example? It's enormous. I did a nibble a few months ago and got my head handed to me [only 20% loss on that effort after a bounceback from a 50% loss]. I'll keep the rest of the cash for a while more. Look at the Nikkei = at the same level as 30 years ago. Imagine the Down at the level of thirty years ago, 18 years from now [that's how long ago the Nikkei peak was at 40,000]. It looks like a good idea to buy companies with cash on hand, profits flooding in from essential services and goods, and dividends flooding out. Debt laden companies selling luxury leisure goods and services and not quite up to profitability are not long for this world. The dead cat bounces down the chart to the bottom of the Dow in 1933 were a long and painful descent. Mqurice