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To: vpelt who wrote (8202)	1/1/1998 7:26:00 PM
From: BACRDI	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 31646

Just watched Moneyline, it was a solid 20 minutes of great coverage for Y2K problem. Yardeni (sp) was very forceful, said he even sees it bringing on a possible recession. Very good show, even got into embedded systems. Also CBS evening news had a 5 minute spot on same problem at the end of thier news. It'll be interesting to see what the Y2K's do tomorrow. Hopefully these will help awareness & stock prices. Ron PS. Taped the show, will review and post any pertinent facts

To: vpelt who wrote (8202)	1/1/1998 8:01:00 PM
From: E	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 31646

Just finished watching CNN, Yardeni vs. Roger McNamee, General Partner at Integral Capital Partners. Took some notes, here are some conversation fragments, not perfectly transcribed, but close enough. Moderator, in introduction: "Many compare y2k approach to the Times Square ball drop, with the ball being a dropped grenade." Yardeni: The more I study this, the more concerned I get...Only one out of 5 companies is ready..We could see devastation for companies not proactive in this....Great cost to the federal government [I think Yardeni said 10 trillion dollars--JM]..We might have to go to a flat tax temporarily....Experts agree companies must act quickly, and even if they solve their own problems, they can be tripped up by others' problems...There could be enough problems that we could have a global recession. McNamee:But over the years, people have anticipated these problems. There has been a recognition that these problems exist, so new software owners will probably be okay...We'll fix a lot of it... Yardeni: There will be a lot of it not fixed, too... Moderator: What should people do when the time comes? McNamee: Be careful not to get stuck inside an elevator or on the wrong side of a burglar alarm... Yardeni: You might not want to get on an airplane,either...The Social Security Administration had been working on this for ten years. They'd discovered 30 million lines of code that had to be fixed. But recently they discovered another 30 million lines of code they hadn't known about... McNamee: A big part of the problelm has been addressed and solutions are on the way. It's important not to view this in apocalyptic terms. People are adaptive. There was a UPS strike, an air traffice controllers' strike, there have been wars. It's possible that this could just be the technological equivalent of Comet Kohoutek... Yardeni: Not an apocalypse, but a recession. The UPS strike could be used as an analogy-- but it would be a global UPS strike. McNamee: The problem is the most severe where technology has been used the longest-- transportation, financial services, the government ....There will be benefits to the service companies who have lots of programmers who go through codes, find the problems, and fix them. Companies like IBM will benefit tremendously. Yardeni: The biggest problem is finding people...You have to go through the lines of code... McNamee: [Re what to do when the time comes] Go to the automatic teller, get cash, avoid elevators and planes. If you're really paranoid. If a company says it's going to spend half a billion dollars on this problem, short its stock. Other companies will come up to take its place. Yardeni: A lot of people are going to do just those things, cancel their flights, etc.. If they start taking enough money out of their automatic teller early enough, we could get the recession in 1999. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [I thought that McNamee's remarks didn't seem as reassuring as he evidently meant them to be. He seemed to be mainly interested in preventing panic, and, unlike Yardeni, he didn't claim to be doing any deep study of the problem. I felt as though Yardeni was speaking from familiarity with the problems, gained from study, and McNamee was presenting attitude and platitude. I felt as though any CEO of a company that hadn't yet started working on this problem and who heard this exchange would be on the phone tomorrow trying to find out where to go to get their problems diagnosed.JM]