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Strategies & Market Trends : Waiting for the big Kahuna -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mike McFarland who wrote (14245)	2/21/1998 5:05:00 PM
From: Bonnie Bear	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 94695

That's all corporate America is doing, they're leveraged to the hilt. And the Ford Explorers and boats are leased or bought on payment - you don't think they'd pay cash for a car when that money could be in their mutual fund? -ggg- The banks who are begging the feds for lower interest rates are also begging the feds for changes in the bankruptcy law- if you buy everything on plastic, buy an expensive car with minimum down payment, buy an expensive house with maximum leverage and down payment borrowed from the credit card, and then lose your job, you can file for bankruptcy and KEEP ALL OF IT. Legally. Without going to jail. No risk. It's so easy to do. You sound kinda unamerican to me. whazzamatta with you boy? Think plastic.

To: Mike McFarland who wrote (14245)	2/21/1998 5:58:00 PM
From: Mitch Blevins	Respond to of 94695

>>I wish I had been saving them<< I did... since mid-December. Got 22 so far... You could easily roll $100K at 4-5% indefinitely on no collateral in the current environment. That is, until the day those letters stop coming. ~Mitch

To: Mike McFarland who wrote (14245)	2/21/1998 6:30:00 PM
From: Tommaso	Respond to of 94695

Oh my! And I thought I was venturesome driving an 85 Nova. Or was until an 85-year-old lady mushed it in a grocery store parking lot. There she was, standing over the wreckage of five automobiles, saying: "It's God's will! That's what it is!." Mine had a made-in-Japan Toyota engine in it and was getting 43 mpg after 110,000 miles. Don't you imagine those $35,000 sports utility vehicles and those $15,000 boats are probably also on credit or leased? And wait until OPEC wakes up and sees they can make three times the money by producing 20% less oil. And gasoline goes to $2.75 a gallon even without extra taxes, with the Ford Explorers costing 25 cents a mile in gasoline just to go to the drugstore. And heating bills for vast under-insulated houses in the colder climate belts going to thousands of dollars even with the thermostat turned down. Our economy is terribly vulnerable from all sorts of directions.

To: Mike McFarland who wrote (14245)	2/22/1998 4:12:00 AM
From: paulmcg0	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 94695

[Oh, that's Thailand, never will happen here] Funny you should mention Thailand -- I was working there last summer when the SET (Stock Exchange of Thailand) crashed and actually saw it happen. I was doing some engineering work at a large Thai company, in their computer/communications room, and they had a data connection to the SET that fed data into HP Unix computers for analysis. They actually had a computer screen that displayed every transaction being executed on the SET and the SET index. When the crash started to happen, the data started scrolling rapidly on the screen, almost faster than the eye could comprehend. What really stunned me was how relentless the market drop was -- people were selling shares at any price they could get for them. To use a technical metaphor, wealth disappeared like liquid nitrogen evaporating on a flat surface -- lots of activity, then it was gone, without leaving a trace behind. Sure people might say -- but that was Thailand, a much smaller market, and they didn't have "circuit breakers" like here in the U.S., so it couldn't happen here that way. I disagree with that view -- the high tech trading systems here, like Instinet which allows for trading after the market closes, Web stock brokerages and 800 phone numbers to brokers and mutual funds are even more technically advanced than the systems in Thailand. The technology we have now in the U.S. is just as capable of allowing a stock price to be devastated in a very short time -- it's already happened with various individual companies on the U.S. stock markets and when it happens to the markets themselves, billions of dollars will be lost in the blink of an eye. If a crash happens, it will be a much more accelerated event than in 1987, because of the technological advances that have happened since then. This is probably an example of what my father (a retired nuclear engineer) warned me about, the unforeseen consequences of technology. (At one point in time, nuclear energy was supposed to produce electricity so cheaply it wouldn't even be metered. Of course, no one thought about the nuclear waste problem...) Paul McGinnis