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Politics : Ask Michael Burke -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Knighty Tin who wrote (54551)	4/4/1999 5:01:00 PM
From: IceShark	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 132070

Mike, But wholesale lying is a fact of life now. I should turn in my CPA license before having one is a criminal act. -g- (I hope the -g- is warranted, but I don't see much evidence unless this scam stabilizes over the next few years and we somehow, someway, grow our way out of it.) BTW, Where did Cobalt go to? I kinda liked her posts and the rooting she would do.

To: Knighty Tin who wrote (54551)	4/4/1999 5:02:00 PM
From: Tommaso	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 132070

I realize that this is just more of our well-chewed fat: One of the striking features of the past five years his been the domination of the financial scene by purely psychological elements. In previous bull markets the rise in stock prices remained in fairly close relationship with the improvement in business during the greater part of the cycle; it was only in its invariably short-lived culminating phase that quotations were forced to disproportionate heights lay the unbridled optimism of the speculative contingent. But in the [present] cycle this "culminating phase" lasted for years instead of months, and it drew its support not from a group of speculators but from the entire financial community. The "new-era" Doctrine-- that "good" stocks (or blue chips) were sound investments regardless of how high the price paid for them-- was at bottom only a means of rationalizing under the title of "investment" the well-nigh universa1 capitulation the gambling fever. We suggest that this psychological phenomenon is closely related to the dominant importance assumed in recent years by intangible factors- of value, viz., goodwill, management, expected earning power, etc. Such value factors while undoubtedly real, are not susceptible to mathematical calculation; hence the standards by which they are measured are to a great extent arbitrary and can suffer the widest variations in accordance with the prevalent psychology. The investing class was the more easily led to ascribe reality to purely speculative valuations of these intangibles because it was dealing in good part with surplus wealth, to which it was not impelled by force of necessity to apply the old-established acid test that the principal value be justified by the income. This is, of course, Benjamin Graham speaking retrospectively of 1921-1933, writing more than sixty years ago.