Why, are they saying this??? Don't they know what is going to happen in the upcoming weeks?

http://www.suntimes.com/output/business/stox06.html

Kathy

-- Kathy (Kathy2308@prodigy.net), December 06, 1999

Answers

They are using different tea leaves Kathy.

-- polar (lander@mars.iThink), December 06, 1999.

When Americans believe their stock market is invulnerable to crashes, when they believe in their arrogance that the world owes them the best, which they squander senselessly, when they won't lift a finger to help the poor in other nations because they're too busy with their sports and television programs, when they believe prosperity will never end...

THEN WATCH OUT FOR A SUDDEN COLLAPSE!

-- dinosaur (dinosaur@williams-net.com), December 06, 1999.

Where you been Kathy? The markets will not crash. Y2K has been fixed. Your money is safe in the banks. The lights will stay on.

Nighty night. Sleep tight. Don't let the millennium bug bite.

-- Linda (lwmb@psln.com), December 06, 1999.

Too many problems around, even without Y2K...the market is over-valued, and the bubble could burst at any time...some recent articles: Global Financial System at Risk

The FED is Paranoid about Y2K

Fed's in for a Confrontation

-- Mad Monk (madmonk@hawaiian.net), December 06, 1999.

How can the stockmarket crash if it keeps going up? And how can the power go off if it keeps staying on? And how can we run out of cash? I mean, doesn't the mint print money, like every single day? Sigh, I guess I just don't understand the doomer mentality.....

-- man (man@war.now), December 06, 1999.

Repo Man Greasepan has been doing some major bubble blowing through the banking system, and he isn't going to let the stock market driven economy crash as long as he is on duty. The guy is completely insane. He has a delusion of grandeur that makes him think he can defy the laws of economics. Sooner or later we will pay a severe price.

-- Hawk (flyin@high.again), December 06, 1999.

This is just speculation, of course. But wouldn't it be interesting if it turned out that Alan Greenspan was actually still a devotee of Objectivism? Maybe he's doing it on purpose, with the following intent:
1. Ruining all the people who are so stupid as to "invest" in companies with no prospects of ever making a profit, much less paying a dividend;
2. Getting all the gold out of the hands of the central banks and into the hands of the conscious members of the public by artificially lowering the price via gold leasing; and
3. Destroying the fractional reserve banking system by making a bank run inevitable.

The result of these three occurrences will be the establishment of a system of sound banking in which the capital will be owned by those who had the foresight to understand what was going to happen. What more could an Objectivist wish for?

-- Steve Heller (stheller@koyote.com), December 07, 1999.

If you listen quietly, you can hear Irving Berlin's song. :-))

Link

-- John (jh@NotReal.ca), December 07, 1999.

Prices won't drop until the big money leaves. The big money won't leave until the prices drop. How can this be hard to understand?

-- Colin MacDonald (roborogerborg@yahoo.com), December 07, 1999.

One of the reasons that Greenspan has managed the Fed so well is that he is probably one of the first Fed Head that not only understands the Fed's strengths, but also understands the Fed's weakness.

-- Ken Seger (kenseger@earthlink.net), December 07, 1999.

Kathy you missed a very important article about a month ago discussing how the professionals who were seeing the writing on the wall are being discouraged from talking about the stock market dipping, much less crashing.

By discouraged I mean they are being fired, warned, bad mouthed, shamed and so forth.

Perhaps someone with more time on their hands can go find the link, if it still works.

-- OR (orwelliator@biosys.net), December 07, 1999.

Paul Volker (sp?) was considered a heel while he fought inflation. Now he's a hero. Greenspan is considered a hero while he supports the raging bull. Soon he will be considered a heel for being the guy who created the bubble. This is not just idle speculation. Every bear who acknowledges the existence of the bubble -- there's as many as 15- 20 of these bears in the world right now and they all publish in Barrons -- blames Greenspan. Why does Greenspan want the market to survive until 01/01/00? So that he can blame Y2K! Sheesh. Soon I'll be writing about Chemtrails.

PS -- "Man": either my sarcasm detector is failing me or you posted one strange post. I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt.

-- Dave (aaa@aaa.com), December 07, 1999.

>> How can the stockmarket crash if it keeps going up? And how can the power go off if it keeps staying on? ...<<

All I can say is: "if"..."if".

Or, to put it another way. If my grandmother had wheels, she would be a trolley. If wishes were horses, beggars would ride. If I had a nickel for every...

-- Brian McLaughlin (brianm@ims.com), December 07, 1999.

Colin, it seems to me that your rationalization could just as easily be applied to a check kiting scheme.

-- Ron Schwarz (rs@clubvb.com.delete.this), December 07, 1999.

Ron -

Exactly. Reminds me of the Clintonesque statement of a senior manager at a major financial services firm. His firm had been convicted of essentiallly "kiting checks" in the acquisition of assets. His statement was that they hadn;t done anything thing wrong -- they simply had "made an overly aggressive use of the 'float'." How about that for rationalization"

-- Mac (sneak@lurk.hid), December 08, 1999.

Item from the Business section of today's San Diego Union-Tribune:

Fundamentals of investing hard to follow in this market

December 8, 1999

How do you select stocks when the only bargains are being beaten up for seasonal reasons?

It's a momentum market -- Wall Street buys rising stocks and dumps falling ones -- and December intensifies that trend: Stocks that have been sold off unjustifiably will be sold off even more for tax purposes.

But does that mean there will be bargains early next year in these beaten-up stocks? Not necessarily, if this extremely narrow market continues. We've had a wackily selective, out-of-kilter market for several years. The high techs, certain telecoms and a few others sell for 50 to 100 times earnings or more, and an Internet stock might sell for 1,000 times sales. (Who needs earnings?)

But more than 60 percent of New York Stock Exchange stocks have dropped this year. The advance-decline line recently hit a four-year low. The NYSE total return index, a measure of average stock performance, is up a mere 1 percent this year. The Value Line geometric index, a performance measure of median-priced stocks, is down more than 3 percent.

Yesterday, the tech stocks continued zooming, but the Dow Jones industrial average and Standard & Poor's 500 dropped, while decliners topped advancers 2 to 1 on the NYSE. The rally since October has been thin, thin, thin.

Value investing -- buying cheap and selling dear -- hasn't worked for several years. The market only wants growth, even though sophisticated investors know that earnings are increasingly manipulated through phony accounting, and Wall Street is looking the other way, as it tends to do in bull and frothy markets.

That high tech selling for 100 times earnings may realistically be selling for infinity times earnings, because if you consider stock options that aren't expensed, sales that are illegitimately recorded, mergers that muddy up numbers, so-called one-time write-offs that keep recurring and reserves that are set up to smooth quarterly earnings, you realize that the company may actually be losing money.

But so what? In hot areas such as the Internet, the greater the losses, the greater the potential, say momentum gamblers.

That makes it hard for conservative money managers...

-- Mac (sneak@lurk.hid), December 08, 1999.