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To: Mark Fowler who wrote (45957)	3/16/1999 11:42:00 AM
From: H James Morris	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 164684

>>What are you tired from?<, Mark, I've got a different life. Sometimes I sleep from 5pm to 7pm. Get up and go back to bed at about mid-night. Then wake up @ 5am. Then it takes me 2 hours if I want just to read this thread. That's tiring don't you think?? Ps I was just lying down reading the below I'm going to beam in. Please read it because it scared me to death. Think about this. With all this wealth being created no one will have to work anymore. I thought I had that job alone. >>REUTERS March 15, 1999 WASHINGTON -- Surging share prices helped double Americans' wealth over the past decade, the Federal Reserve said, leading to uneasiness about the ever-larger role stocks play in household finances. The Fed's balance sheet of household wealth, included in its fourth-quarter "flow of funds report" on Friday, said U.S. households' total net worth had risen at the end of 1998 to $36.79 trillion from $18.38 trillion at the end of 1988. The totals include every kind of financial asset a typical household might own, from the value of real estate holdings to bank deposits, stocks and bonds, and any reserves that have piled up in insurance and pensions. Especially striking was the mounting proportion of household wealth that was in the form of ownership of corporate equities and mutual fund shares -- a combined $8.77 trillion, or 24 percent of the total at the end of last year. By contrast, at the end of 1988, the combined value of individual company stocks and mutual fund shares owned by households was a far lower $2.02 trillion -- or 11 percent of their total wealth. Economist Sung Won Sohn of Wells Fargo Bank in Minneapolis, Minn., said consumer spending was a point of vulnerability for the economy, saying that household spending fell more when stock prices were falling than it rose during bull markets. "The pain on the way down is always much more severe than the joy on the way up," Sohn said. With the Dow Jones industrial average now flirting with 10,000, many analysts have been sounding warning bells that an eventual softening in stock prices could have an exaggerated impact on the booming U.S. economy. Much of the eight-year-long expansion has been fueled by rising consumer spending. Weaker prices for stocks, especially for high-flying Internet issues, could cause homeowners to pull in their horns on spending if it seemed the upward spiral was losing steam. The Fed also said rising real estate values, at $9.22 trillion from $5.95 trillion a decade ago, contributed notably to the growth of U.S. household wealth. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, who famously warned about "irrational exuberance" among investors late in 1996, recently noted that rising real estate values now were contributing importantly to brisk consumer spending. Still, real estate represented a far less volatile factor in accelerating wealth than was the stock market. Real estate values were up 55 percent over the 10-year period while corporate equities and mutual fund share values skyrocketed 334 percent. Surveys show that 48 percent of all American households owned stock in 1998 - in equity stakes in individual companies, through mutual funds or their pensions -compared with 32 percent that were stockholders in 1989, Sohn said. <<