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Technology Stocks : Qualcomm Incorporated (QCOM) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: engineer who wrote (6148)	12/11/1997 11:33:00 AM
From: dougjn	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 152472

There is every reason to believe, from what I've seen, that the Korean situation is MUCH worse than our S&L / banking crisis of 1989-early 90s. A far larger portion of their financial system is insolvent. As in most of it. A far larger portion of their corporate world is also insolvent. There will be enormous social opposition to the changes required. It will take over a year, I would think, for the solutions to be agreed on, and then longer to begin working. While they have advantages...a harder working population (esp. from middle down) than the US, much higher savings rates. But those savings rates have been way more than spent by corp/financial sectors that have borrowed and built w/almost no attention to profitability. Just faith that their Asian virtues would lead to their prevailing so long as they entered any particular market vigorously enough. In the process they have built up even worse layers of management / than US did in 50s-70s, as well as redundant workers forced by some of world's strongest unions. Even many of their middle managers are unionized. Korea is facing a Depression, in my opinion. Only question is how long it will last. That depends upon domestic politics. While I'm not sure how much all this will affect Qcom, I am sure it will hurt some, and perhaps quite a bit in the short/intermediate term. Also think the market will THINK that Qcom will be badly hurt. If someone were gonna do a list of Cos. most exposed to Korea, specifically, I think you'd get some of the semi equip makers, no surprise, but also perhaps the mighty Q? THAT announcement probably isn't built into the price yet. Doug