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Strategies & Market Trends : Currencies and the Global Capital Markets -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Chip McVickar who wrote (45)	5/6/1998 9:52:00 AM
From: Henry Volquardsen	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3536

Chip, I agree that larger currency blocks will have a stabilizing influence. Asia will be a tough nut however. The Japanese economy and the yen would dominate the other currencies and given recent history it would be difficult to see how the other Asians would be willing to accept this. I am not a big fan of the IMF. Their cures are often worse than the illness. The problem is that big governments feel more comfortable dealing with a big agency like the IMF and can distance themselves from having to deliver austerity messages. It is not the US, Japan etc telling Indonesia to cut living standards, it some faceless, stateless bureaucrat. Frankly I would prefer giving the market a freer hand in these situations and reducing the IMF to a supervisory and regulatory role. There is a large need for that. Take Indonesia. I believe a currency board would work for Indonesia but I don't trust their government to enforce it. The IMF could be useful in monitoring compliance. Henry

To: Chip McVickar who wrote (45)	5/6/1998 10:32:00 AM
From: Jerry in Omaha	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3536

Greetings Mr. Carpenter; You posted; <<Never understood why the IMF needed to be secretive..... except that it's run by the 'elite' and that's what they like for management.>> Perhaps something I posted on another thread could help shed some light on that phenomenon. In a discussion on why corporate directors and managers lurk and don't post on Silicon Investor threads I said: "...lawyers have been doing their job of putting the fear of God and Gavel into the ears of hypnotized executive eyes staring at a screen full of Silicon Investors. They know full-well that any posting sets a perilous precedent possessing tar-baby tenacity. The posting portal is one way only and putting finger to keyboard means first removing it from the dike holding in the corporate secrets; the real power in corporate hierarchy." There is a basic conflict with increasing information access and the absolute need to control the flow of the information of wealth and the wealth of information needing control. The perception of the need for secrecy can only increase. What will be the enhanced premium for secrecy? What counter costs will result to free information flow using mis- and dis-information? What about the inherent fragility of total reliance on electronically encoded "bits and bytes" of currency? What if one of Henry's fond French loonies gets really pissed off and pops a 2KT Elecrtro Magnetic Pulse device some 250 miles directly over Bonn and fries all of EURO's microchips? You posted; <<Financial panics may become a thing of the past....as larger currency blocks stabilize the markets...>> I contend that as corporate hierarchies flee to increasing secrecy the masses will flee to secure currencies especially those of long-standing stability like gold. Maybe Y2K will fizzle; maybe it will sizzle; but it just might frizzle the fragile electronic basket that holds all our non-golden currency eggs. What else is "out there," agent Carpenter? Do you Want to Believe? Jerard P