Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Technology Stocks : TLAB info? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JMD who wrote (2929)	8/12/1998 2:06:00 AM
From: dougjn	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 7342

Mike, that is too futurist for me to pay too much attention to. I'm a major believer in technology. But I think time extended future gazing must be done with an extremely high discount factor. So to speak. I think, for example, putting much of your money into blimps in the late 1920's would have been a poor idea. (Take a look at futurist illustrations at that time of downtown New York, as an world example, to see what I mean. Blimps large and small everywhere in the Metropolis, with docking stations on multi-levels to match.) The Asians used to ridicule the short term orientation of the US markets. I still think there was some grain of truth to that. (I.e., lets look a year or two ahead, not a quarter or two.) On the other hand, Japan thought it had the secret of future prosperity clinched for all time by its MITI and Finance Ministry planning. Which turned out to be based on what had worked based on copying the Americans and beating them at their own game and forging forward from there with newer equipment, cheaper capital, and harder workers Turns out after they caught up they didn't know where to go next. They kept doing more of the same. We didn't. Not because we had some much wiser central repository of knowledge and direction, but because we didn't. We just had lots and lots of corps trying to figure out how to recover and get their returns on capital up from negative to big, big positive. Thing is, our system is like the gene pool. We have gazillion competitors trying to succeed and survive, trying to figure it out, and as soon as they see an advantage they lunge, the market funds, it goes up, more money comes in. And it either gets big fast or collapses. No other system comes close to this funding speed and flexibility. It is a MAJOR reason for our prosperity. Nobody else has anything like our venture capital funding system. Which in turn is based upon the receptivity of our IPO market, which no one else approaches. And for that matter, no other country approaches our restructuring (before or after bankruptcy) markets either. It's not really that Americans have some innate engineering or technical ability or inclination. (Not at all it seems to me. They're heavily foreign born.) It's much more that if you've got a promising technical idea, no matter where you come from in America, or for that matter, from Europe, India, China, Latin America or where ever, you can get hyper funding, hyper fast, and strike it big, hyper much, in America. I.e., we have by far the best investment banking system in the World. Not by percentages, but by multiples. (Well, OK, Great Britain is now catching up a bit. But is still way behind.) That's the true engine of our success. The funding and the market discipline (including very swift and severe punishment) of our capital markets system. And the fact that America will make the originator of the commercially great idea, really, truly rich. More than anywhere else. Way more. Free land or nearly so, and natural resources used to be our main catalysts. Now its our capital system. Our investment banking and capital markets systems. (Mike, on reading over this diatribe, I guess its a bit noisy. Believe it all, but sorry for the strong tone. Decided to let it rip, rather than delete.) <g> Doug