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Politics : Idea Of The Day -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: AlienTech who wrote (16456)	1/16/1998 4:37:00 PM
From: Joe S Pack	Respond to of 50167

Alien and the thread: It has been a while since I participated in this thread. Lot of works in this of the terminal. I am trying to digest 1997 effects and reasoning about how I can be better off in 1998. Enough said. Now some thing of general interest. From AP news feed. JOHN CUNNIFF= Business Analyst= NEW YORK (AP) _ This is what some of the ''experts'' have been up (down) to: _Most mutual fund managers failed to beat the popular averages last year. _After worrying all year long about inflation that never came, Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve chairman and the nation's most powerful monetary official, has been expressing concern about deflation, which is the precise opposite. _The Congressional Budget Office, which overestimated last year's deficit by more than $100 billion, has extended its line of sight to the year 2001 when, it says, we could very well have a budget in balance. _The big-name doomsayers of the market changed their tune again last year. Nothing new in that; ''experts'' do it all the time. But some of these switches were particularly noteworthy. Elaine Garzarelli said to sell all stocks and several months later forecast 8900 on the Dow Jones industrial average. After more than a decade as a bear, Joseph Granville became a bull and said the Dow would soar to more than 12,000 points. Bob Prechter could not be lured by the bull market. He remained a bear, as he has been since 1987. During this time the greatest bull market of all occurred. _For the second time in a row, Wall Street Journal staffers throwing darts beat a team of four investment professionals in choosing stocks for performance during the latter half of 1997. So, what is an expert and who qualifies as such, at least in money matters, where a premium is placed on insight into the future? The question has significance, because small investors increasingly rely on ''experts'' rather than doing their own thinking. The dictionary is of no help whatever, since its adheres to a strict academic view that an expert is a person having special skill or knowledge derived from training or experience. But fitting the description doesn't make one a prudent forecaster. And such people hardly qualify as expert under Nicholas Murrary Butler's oft-cited definition of an expert as one who knows more and more about less and less. Perhaps an expert is one in whom a large bank entrusts responsibility for an eight-figure loan or investment portfolio. For sure, no bank would ever do that without checking out not only the individual's past and present but potential as well. But just a minute. Aren't these the people who made those terrible third-world loans that forced up domestic interest rates in the 1970s?. And who gave us the great savings and loan fiasco? And who stand to lose their shirts in the Far East? And who send out 2 billion credit-card solicitations a year. And who see no danger in $600 billion or so of outstanding credit-card debt while some of them write off 8 percent of all their credit-card loans. That hardly sounds like expertise. And yet, even as they prove the opposite, the tag is applied to those who deal in money more so than to people in almost any other area of endeavor, and they are honored, acclaimed and paid five-figure lecture sums to disclose their insights. Money expertise, like money itself, is earned over the years. Take Warren Buffet. Now there's an expert. --- - Karun