I promised myself that I would not participate in discussion groups for a few weeks, I am trying to cut down, but I need the knowledge of the group for this one:

Reuters News Service today reported that a British electric company is going to buy 20 nuclear reactors in Canada. Are they just dumb? We all know that the Nuke plants will be the first to fail.

A few weeks ago Daimler/Benz bought Dodge motor company. Are they just dumb? We all know that when Dodge tested their system the plant shut down and the executives could not even get out of the building.

Toyota and General Motors are flirting with each other. Are they just dumb? We all know that GM has 200 millions of lines to fix with nobody to fix them.

All those dumb multi national companies out there being so dumb, sure makes me feel smart. I took all my money out of the bank and bought a shotgun. That will show them!

-- Bill Solorzano (notaclue@webtv.net), June 01, 1998

Answers

Dear Bill

In simple terms, I would credit this to the herd mentality. The bulls are rampaging on Wall Street, just as they were in 1928. At that time, there were those who anticipated the crash and positioned themselves in land and cash equivalents. There were many who wrongly assumed the market climb would continue inexorably upwards, even in the face of record price earnings ratio's. Many of those were window jumpers on that day in October, 1929. The same is recurring in 1998. With a DJ of 9000, there are still analysts who say it will continue upwards, even though P/E ratios are at an all time high. There is an intoxicating effect at work in the marketplace right now, an almost drunken stupor expecting continued prosperity. It has always been thus: just before the crash. Negative news is simply ignored and anyone who spreads it is regarded as a party pooper by those who are drunk on their recent paper profits. Can those in charge of fortune 500 companies be so stupid? Yes, they are human and therefore have the capacity to be lemmings. We see it mirrored in the way our Chief Executive Clinton is steering the Good Ship America. He prefers to be silent on this threat and to work behind the scenes, setting up the structure he will need to have in place if chaos occurs. We also live in the microwave, instant society. A threat that is even one year away is viewed as distant. Our computers obsolesce every two years. We acquire and throw away and things are designed to break. The arrogance of our society assumes that if a threat is a year away, some computer genius will find the quick and easy fix that will make it all go away.

-- Rev. Stephen L. Bening (Gammadim@AOL.com), June 01, 1998.

I wish I could help you with your explanation. You have voiced things that I have been wondering about the past few months. Today on Yahoo headlines Monsanto is merging with American Home products ( http://dailynews.yahoo.com/headlines/top_stories/story.html?s=z/reuters/980601/news/stories/monsanto_2.html ) What does a drug company need with a chemical company that has the patent to genetically engineered seed (and the potential to control everything we grow)???

There have been more mergers in utility companies that don't make sense as well. Rev Benning could be right about it repeating a pattern from 1928. I certainly don't see any pattern or any common sense to all of this. Having lived in both rural midwest and Phoenix (major metro area), I do understand the difference in attitude in each place and even how it affects people when they don't even realize it.

I'm confused and I'll admit it.

-- Rebecca Kutcher (kutcher@pionet.net), June 01, 1998.

A quick comment... GM has 2 billion lines of code. Gag. :)

-- Pastor Chris (chrisbr@ptinet.net), June 01, 1998.

Since the world has been liberated from Communism, the only natural enemy of our free enterprise system of mindless Capitalism, there is now no reason to suppose that bad things will ever happen again. Ronald Reagan taught us this and you weren't listening, apparently. Just try to think positive, why don't you! Try to understand that if you don't grow, you die. And if it turns out that by growing, you die anyway, well, at least you grew, and you can die a hero's death.

-- Joseph Danison (JDanison@aol.com), June 08, 1998.

Rebecca:

You had your finger right on it. American Home produces geneticaly engineered seed that produces a crop that destroys the seed for the next crop. The farmer must buy new seed every season. Monsanto produces the pesticides that kill everything but the designed seed from American Home. Cute isn't it? Between them they have a head start to corner the global food market. It's a lot like what "Similac" did in Latin America about 10 years ago. The Drs at the maternity hospitals gave the new and ignorant mothers a three months supply of free Similac when the baby was born. After 3 months, the mothers milk was dried up. Then they had to pay for the Similac which was way beyond their financial means. The mothers were desperate and started to add more water to what Similac they could buy, and the babies slowly starved to death. Good business I guess but what a shame and what a crime. It's a little like hooking drug addicts and raising the prices on them.

-- Bill Solorzano (notaclue@webtv.net), June 09, 1998.