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Politics : President Barack Obama -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (45858)	11/29/2008 11:47:30 AM
From: Lizzie Tudor	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 149317

Lizzie come on.......how many tech stocks were once trading for over $100 and now are trading for less then $10 bucks? Where did all that wealth go? There is huge debt....but much of it doesn't appear on any company's books. The debt is with all the shareholders who got burned. Thats the way its supposed to work. I take it you weren't around in 1985. Same exact thing happened, people that were investors in Commodore and Atari, and Orange computer and Eagle and hundreds of others, lost. If you invested in Apple or waited for MSFT you won. Exact same thing as internet, with Google being msft. The internet was just bigger than most other booms, leaving Cisco, Ebay, Google, dozens of huge companies. That isn't normal usually there are only a few. The internet was huge- a huge boom and a huge bust. But a new huge industry too. What is supposed to happen is a bunch of names come up and most die and some are left. That is new wealth, the companies left who become giants. But the whole hypergrowth phase is contained to the growth area itself. What is NOT supposed to happen is 200 year old companies are going under after a boom. Also I can't think of any new companies that were created by the housing bubble to serve it in the same way that Apple, MSFT were created in the PC bubble. Even the housing companies that "boomed" were the same companies that had been around forever. Whatever the housing bubble was, it was not a classic boom. Look at it this way: when the auto business was born a century ago, investors faced hundreds of choices, including Ford, General Motors and Chrysler. If you had, by good fortune, bought stock in one of those three, you would be riding high now. But as David L. Lewis, a professor of business history at the University of Michigan, points out, for every auto company that became a giant, "there were a couple of hundred that did not make it, and people lost a substantial amount of money." While you might have bought stock in General Motors, you could have just as easily picked, say, the U.S. Motor Corporation, which failed in 1911. The auto industry was just one example. Investors learned the same lesson when the personal-computer industry got off the ground in the early 1980's. While investing early in Compaq Computer would have made someone a fortune, there were plenty of disappointments: Vector Graphics, for example, or Eagle Computer, both of which went bankrupt within a few years. "In the early stages, you have to avoid kidding yourself and thinking you know how it's going to turn out," said Mr. Murphy, the newsletter writer. query.nytimes.com