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Politics : Bill Clinton Scandal - SANITY CHECK -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jlallen who wrote (19307)	12/14/1998 2:26:00 PM
From: Charles Hughes	Respond to of 67261

Today's political guru pronouncement and market forecast. From me personally, at not charge! The market and the impeachment still seem to be linked. This last few days votes on articles of impeachment, against censure, and for final impeachment recommendation to the house track pretty well with market action. Prior to the last couple of weeks, it looked for a little while like BC was going to get away unscathed, and for that period the market bounced back. About two weeks ago it started looking again like it was going to be serious for him, and the market started getting funky. From a technical perspective, the picture looks like a confirmed top to me. Dissent? Interruptions to this trend have come solely from the Fed, and they can't do that interest rate trick every week. Can they make the markets break through the top significantly through minor interest rate adjustments alone? World economies will not recover overnight, as those collapses reflect a belated engagement with reality in many economies that has been waiting through years to happen. There seems to be a general nervousness that the relationship between assets, earnings, and stock price has grown too tenuous and other models are not convincing for the average investor. This translates to a spreading conviction that stock prices are already too high. What's the best thing that could happen to the market today? The prez's case is thrown out by the whole house. What the second best thing that could happen to the market? A few more well spaced, small, interest rate adjustments. Intended to help the economy long term, rather than just the market short term. What's the third best thing? Maybe a fifteen or twenty percent fallback, which we recover from, not in the jack-in-the-box fashion we are used to of late, but over time, a few percent a year, giving economic realities, money value, and so forth a chance to catch up with the market. A sideways market, for a while. Well, OK, that's best for investors, not the brokers, but I think that's OK. ------------------------------------------------------------------ That's just talking about the market and politics, of course. We could also solve any ten of a hundred major problems confronting the world at this crucial point and have a good chance to ignite a new era of progress and confidence. You might think that an end to legalized usury, real political reform, aggressive enforcement of business rules (i.e. against MSFT), a level playing field for small business competition, taking real action to affect the most horrific poverty in the world, an end to aggravating conflicts to sell arms, or perhaps doing something effective about our very very rapid environmental degradation might be of some use to the economy and thus the market as well. Solving even a couple of problems of this scale (which I admit probably span several orders of magnitude in difficulty), would infuse people everywhere with a fresh sense of optimism we desperately need now. This could happen even though there are many very serious, pressing, time-critical problems begging for our attention just now. But as a race we seem to be too stupid/corrupt for that, on the whole. For instance, it looks like we are going to miss the window of opportunity to reverse major climate changes currently under way. Perhaps we have already done so. Out of greed and stupidity. And when we need leadership to solve problems, the political establishment involves itself in an effort to reverse a presidential election. Cheers, Chaz P.S. Real reason the Aliens don't visit here, and I quote: "Whatever they've got down there, it might be catching."