| 12/31/2000 - Wall Street's Humbling Year |
| Stocks dropped across the board Friday during the final
session of 2000... helping Wall Street put the lid on a most
humbling year. In fact, Friday's selling left the tech-weary
Nasdaq with its worst one-year loss in that market's
history. |
 |
| 12/29/2000 - Gold And Deflation |
| "...In the last half of the `20s, the Fed began to become nervous by what it saw as excessive borrowing and `irrational exuberance' in the stock market. In 1925, the Discount Rate charged to commercial banks for Fed funds was only 3%. |
|
| 12/28/2000 - Backlash Against Wall Street |
| "...until about two years ago, it was customary for venture capitalists to fund start-up enterprises until they proved themselves. A company was expected to have at least three years' of profits and growth before it went public. |
|
| 12/27/2000 - Cashing Royalty Checks |
| "...The world financial system may experience a catastrophic meltdown, but your appreciation of it will depend on your perspective. The collapse of the dot.coms, for example, is comedy to us. |
|
| 12/26/2000 - A Christmas Letter |
| "...after church - at about 11 PM - we returned home and gathered around the fire again, partly for intimacy...but largely just for heat. The fireplace is the only source of heat out in that wing of the of the house. |
|
| 12/25/2000 - The Ghost Of Christmas Future |
| "...The spirit conducted them beyond a full, bright moon... to where the moon shone no more. It was as if a tide of night had washed the stars out of the sky. It was black. |
|
| 12/23/2000 - The Santa Claus Rally |
| The "Santa Claus" rally arrived early on Wall Street.
Traditionally, the boost markets enjoy from holiday cheer is
felt just after the Christmas break, but on Friday, the
"beleaguered Nasdaq" (Reuter's) got an early x-mas gift. |
|
| 12/22/2000 - The Ghost Of Christmas Present |
| "...Ebenezer could barely suppress a "humbug." For he knew there were advances coming in the biotech and microtechnical sectors that would cure cripples and blind people. He had seen the IPOs go up by 10 times. |
|
| 12/21/2000 - The Ghost Of Christmas Past |
| "... "What are these chains you wear?" "They are the chains you forge for yourself. But instead of gold and silver, yours are laden with computer terminals, stock certificates, portfolio statements, the New Era... Amazon.com. |
|
| 12/20/2000 - In It Together |
| "...we have seen is that increases in the division of labor and knowledge seem to lead to collectivized stupidity. Unable to form an opinion on the quality of the meat they eat...nor on the quality of mortgage debt bought by Fannie Mae... |
|
| 12/19/2000 - Heart Of Truth |
| "...People speak casually about the truth -- as if it were something that they could look up in an encyclopedia and zap around the Internet. The "digital men" seemed to think that truth was the same as information... |
|
| 12/18/2000 - "Got It"- Good And Hard |
| "...Wolff describes what is like when the absurd pretensions of the New Era techies met feeble, empty-headed corporate America: "I wish I could communicate, however guilty I feel about it now, |
|
| 12/15/2000 - Lost At Sea |
| "...yesterday, the "gray-haired pinkos" were still adrift in the Caribbean...and I had revealed my secret weapon to you: Ignorance. Most of the big mistakes made in this world are made by people who refuse to give ignorance its due... |
|
| 12/14/2000 - Ship Of Fools |
| "...Believers in the random movement of stock prices, meanwhile, seem to have engineered their own destruction. If stocks move in a completely random way, the only reasonable thing to do is to "buy and hold". |
|
| 12/13/2000 - Darwinism And Other Nonsense |
| "...by way of further introduction, we practice a division of labor in our household. Elizabeth decides where we live, what we eat, where our (six!) children go to school, how we spend our money and so forth. |
|
| 12/12/2000 - Man, God and French Chefs |
| "...at least a couple DR readers have wondered why I make my home in France. To some, living in France in the time of Chirac has no more appeal than serious dental work in the time of Colbert. |
|
| 12/11/2000 - In Greenspan We Trust? |
| "...eventually, investors stop worrying about the return on their money and begin to fret about the return OF their money. Dodgy stocks and bonds fall. Junk bond yields soar. |
|
| 12/08/2000 - Greenspan's Put Is Shot |
| "...The entire psycho-profile and attitude of the market is changing. Instead of dreams...there will be nightmares. Venture funds are being replaced vulture funds. |
|
| 12/07/2000 - The Greenspan Put II |
| "...shareholders believe that Mr. Greenspan still holds the big put option that will save them from losses. But does he? Can a change in policy by the Fed save the Mr. Mussers of this world? |
|
| 12/06/2000 - Cleansing The Investment Pool |
| "...VC investors often got out early - with as much as 1,000% profits. Many other investors sold out too - at prices much higher than their acquisition costs. But those who held should qualify for the investment equivalent of the Darwin Awards. |
|
| 12/05/2000 - Falling Down |
| "...it is not often that the end of the world comes. So, when it does, people tend to be unprepared. In fact, of all the world's peoples none are quite as unprepared for deflation as Americans. |
|
| 12/04/2000 - Lust Like In The Movies |
| "...financial debt increased from $3 trillion to $8 trillion from '92 to present. Where did that money go? Did it get invested in new plant and equipment? |
|
| 12/02/2000 - Still Seeking The Big Bottom |
| Friday looked as though it might give techies just what
they've been yearning for, for the better part of this
Autumn of Anxiety: the big bottom. But by the end of the
day it was obvious the rally had little moxie. |
|
| 12/01/2000 - Sinking The Greenspan Put |
| "...a put option is merely an agreement that gives you the right to sell - to put - something to someone else at a given price. Put options protect you in a falling market - since they give you the right to sell shares |
|
| 11/30/2000 - The Poverty Of The Information Revolution |
| "...the way to build wealth is no secret. You must save money and invest it in things that will produce more. A farmer saves his 'seed corn' and then plants it. The more he saves and the more he plants |
|
| 11/29/2000 - Wealth Of Information |
| "...but as access to information increased, something unexpected happened - the actual effect of the information glut was to force people to accept group- |
|
| 11/28/2000 - Dumbbells |
| "...the ideas and information that people argued about were political. The greater the abundance of such `information,' the more likely people were to turn to mob-like interpretations of it. |
|
| 11/27/2000 - The Information Glut |
| "...instead of actually figuring things out for himself, in other words, the average person becomes even more susceptible to the collective illusions around him. Mob thinking replaces individual thinking |
|
| 11/25/2000 - Post-Turkey Day Boost |
| Most years trading is slow on the Friday after Thanksgiving
- but as you know...this year IS different. Mr. Market used
a half-day session on Friday to recoup a smidgeon of early-
week losses. |
|
| 11/24/2000 - Derriere Pensees |
| "...investors do not typically enjoy 24% annual rates of growth just before hitting a market bottom. Instead, such growth normally proceeds a top. The rate of growth you would expect at a bottom would be negative. |
|
| 11/23/2000 - Thanksgiving Anno Dominus 2000 |
| "...while Mississippians will sit down with the rest of the nation...and tuck into their turkeys with equal relish...perhaps only substituting Bourbon Pecan pie for the sweet potato or pumpkin pie enjoyed in Maryland.. |
|
| 11/22/2000 - Fatal Decisions |
| "...if you look at the aggregate financial numbers for the entire U.S. economy, you see that buying very low- yielding assets, with much high-yielding debt, was just what was going on. |
|
| 11/21/2000 - Disgracful Wallowing In The Misery Of Others: Enjoy It While You Can |
| "...the Germans have a word for it: schadenfroh. It describes the happiness you feel when an obnoxious neighbor’s house burns down...or you discover that body lying alongside the highway is that of a tort lawyer or IRS auditor |
|
| 11/20/2000 - Ugly Money |
| "...if the currency is ugly, will investors be rewarded for owning it? "For at least the last five years, a Kiwi dollar would buy you in New Zealand just about what an American dollar would buy you in America..." |
|
| 11/17/2000 - Ugly Stocks |
| "...if there is any justice in the market, investors who own the most hip, fashionable and cool stocks should pay the highest price. I can sense you are getting ahead of me, dear reader... |
|
| 11/16/2000 - Value vs. Momentum: The Law Of Perverse Outcomes |
| "...contrary to what you may have commonly observed, even the absence of brains is no guarantee of success in modern America. |
|
| 11/15/2000 - Coconuts |
| "...democracy in America is not merely, nor even principally, a system of government - it is a system of mass entertainment. Wall Street and Main Street provide the bread. Washington and Hollywood supply the circuses." |
|
| 11/14/2000 - The Palm Beach Story |
| "...in a real fight, these Republican politicians are the sort of men and women whom you might have serving soup...or maybe starching the general's tunic. You could never count on them to protect your flanks. |
|
| 11/13/2000 - All Quiet On The Western Front |
| "...'How could 1,000 years of culture have produced this?' asks the lead character in Erich Maria Remarque's 'All Quiet on the Western Front,' speaking for an entire generation. Bourgeois culture became the enemy. |
|
| 11/11/2000 - Investors Irked, Voters Unnerved |
| "Investors irked by poor earnings and unnerved by the
presidential election limbo," begins a Reuter's weekly
recap. |
|
| 11/10/2000 - American Peso |
| "...'All currencies,' she did not say, 'including gold and silver, are features of the collective imagination. Their only value comes from what people en masse believe them to be worth.' |
|
| 11/09/2000 - Deathwatch |
| "...the collective mood that drives stock prices has changed. Several websites have sprung up specifically to mock the losses in the dot.com/tech area. Instead of marveling at the new tech and net breakthroughs of the New Economy |
|
| 11/08/2000 - Dead Presidents |
| "...when Americans borrow overseas, it increases demand for dollars on world markets, boosting the value of the dollar - thus further increasing the purchasing power of dead presidents. The circle appears virtuous. |
|
| 11/07/2000 - Kiwi Bonds |
| "...On the fundamentals, the Kiwi dollar is no worse than other dollars. And yet, thanks to the momentum recently, and perhaps even still, favoring the U.S. currency, prices in New Zealand are marked down by 40% since 1996. |
|
| 11/06/2000 - Special Election Issue |
| "...Politicians need to position themselves as close to the point of balance as possible - the point where the most money can be squeezed out of people for the benefit of the largest possible number of voters. |
|
| 11/04/2000 - Trendless Market |
| Not much to report on this fine pre-election weekend.
Investors, cautious about any major stock market moves
before Election Day, did little trading Friday. |
|
| 11/04/2000 - The Fall Of King Dollar |
| "...with no direct experience nor any points of reference, investors are caught up in the latest collective thinking. The dollar is strong because of 'technology in America' or because the U.S. economy is 'more flexible,' 'dynamic' and so on. |
|
| 11/02/2000 - Take Me To Your Leader |
| "...technology has been the stock market leader. Perhaps some investors are emotionally attached to it and disheartened by the setbacks it has received. |
|
| 11/01/2000 - All Saint's Day |
| "...Halloween is an example of what Philippe Muray calls "Festivus." Muray has noticed the way in which the genuine, dark, primeval, wild and dangerous currents and undercurrents in society have been tamed...and transformed into harmless celebrations. |
|
| 10/31/2000 - The Destruction Of Technology |
| "...Doug Casey likes to compare the Tech Stock Boom to the periodic booms in junior mining companies. He reminds us that almost every boom in the junior mining stocks was capped with the discovery of a huge fraud. |
|
| 10/30/2000 - Deracination |
| "...as the division of labor expands, fewer and fewer people have the time or inclination to hunt for their own mushrooms. We are all deracinated, cut off from direct knowledge of the things that really matter to us. |
|
| 10/28/2000 - Whispers Of A Soft Landing |
| The Commerce Dept. rolled over and whispered sweet nothings
into the market's ear early Friday morning... releasing GDP
numbers showing growth slowed considerably in the 3rd
quarter to 2.7%. |
|
| 10/27/2000 - Rage Against The Machine |
| "...now that the Internet is considered an indispensable learning tool, I can't help but wonder how the poor unfortunates in pre-Internet, pre-Bandwidth plenty era ever got along. Aristotle, Archimedes, Plato, |
|
| 10/26/2000 - But Low, Sell High |
| "...you have to approach investing as a private buyer would. You don't want to 'get into the market' or 'invest in stocks'. You just want to find a decent business. So, you have to do what Warren Buffett does. |
|
| 10/25/2000 - Fiat Justicia, Pereat Mundus |
| "...people have to decide what to do. Reason, experience, luck and observation guide many actions. Others - such as the German people's support of Herr Hitler or the tech bubble on Wall Street - are driven by collective thought... |
|
| 10/24/2000 - The Sunny Side Of Life |
| "...Jesus understood the difference between politics and the market. In politics, people tell others what to do. |
|
| 10/23/2000 - Choir Practice At St. Marcel |
| "... the makeshift choir at St. Marcel would have been an embarrassment to any Baptist church in even a third-rate Texas backwater town. Baptists do not mind belting out 'Amazing Grace' and 'We're Sinking Deep in Sin' - and really enjoying it. |
|
| 10/21/2000 - The Daily Reckoning Weekend Edition |
| Early in the week it looked like Mr. Bear was going to
have his way with Goldilocks... and anyone else that
happened by in the forest. |
|
| 10/20/2000 - Clueless |
| "...the investor in publicly traded stocks relies on the same sort of knowledge as the editorialist - wissen... indirect, abstract, collective 'knowledge.' If there is an 'oil crisis' in the news, he expects his oil stocks to do well. |
|
| 10/19/2000 - Heart Of Gold |
| "...gold has played an important role in [building wealth] for many generations. This is not to say that other ways of amassing and preserving wealth have not been found. "Money" is, after all, an abstraction. |
|
| 10/18/2000 - The De-Leveraging Of America |
| "...The company was a public company. On the basis of the published information - less extensive and less detailed then what we had in front of us - investors had spent millions to buy the shares. |
|
| 10/17/2000 - The Rich Are Different |
| "...Buffett is so rich; how come he's not smart?...He may choose to give [his money] to his own children, or to welfare children. It's up to him. There is no 'right of the womb,' divine or otherwise. |
|
| 10/16/2000 - Turning The Page |
| "...you have heard the expression 'a fool and his money are soon parted.' What puzzles me, as Doug Casey once asked, is how these people got together with their money in the first place. |
|
| 10/14/2000 - The Daily Reckoning Weekend Edition |
| Boy...what a week. Like a huge swell marking the arrival
of a storm at sea, the Nasdaq rolled tech investors high
above the surf on Friday - climbing over 7.8%. By day's
end the Nasdaq had closed up 242 to 3,316. |
|
| 10/13/2000 - The World's Most Despised Stocks-II |
| "...Not only is the country suffering from a recession and its highest unemployment since the 1930s, but social unrest and guerrilla warfare are escalating.' Contrarians should love Columbia. |
|
| 10/12/2000 - The World's Most Despised Stocks |
| "...every extraordinary market boom seems to lead to an equal and opposite extraordinary market bust... Newton's law seems to work in reverse. |
|
| 10/11/2000 - Theory And Experience |
| "...in the Industrial Revolution, the evidence of a major change was easy to see. Machines produced things more quickly and more cheaply than they could be made by hand. |
|
| 10/10/2000 - Easy Come, Easy Go |
| "...Until 1982," writes Marc Faber, describing the latest and greatest market sensation, "the Nasdaq, which started trading in 1971 with an index value of 100, never exceeded 200. By 1990, it was still below 500. |
|
| 10/09/2000 - South Beach |
| Another man said hello to everyone he met. "...Abominations of the flesh are popular in South Beach. A woman with tattoos all over her sunburned body went by. So minimal was her outfit that it might have gone unnoticed... |
|
| 10/07/2000 - The Daily Reckoning Weekend Edition |
| The Wealth Effect has gone seriously into reverse," Bill
Bonner wrote in the Daily Reckoning on Friday... the
Nasdaq, suffering severe Big Tech earnings warnings lost a
total of 8.5% for week. |
|
| 10/06/2000 - Las Vegas |
| "...the city is remarkable - spread out in the desert for no reason other than there doesn't seem to be anything to stop it. It sits in an empty stretch of barren, hot ground. |
|
| 10/05/2000 - Convergence |
| "...Webhead, futurists and "new era" investment advocates believe that this development is of transcendent importance...sort of like the Second Coming or an invasion from space. |
|
| 10/04/2000 - Losing It |
| "...Cramer seems to have lost it: "The great sums spent to make great [web]sites," he writes, "look like colossal wastes if even the best of them, Amazon, is having trouble making money. |
|
| 10/03/2000 - The Lambda Factor |
| "...I set myself too modest a goal in these Daily Reckoning readers: chronicling the most thundering examples of human lunacy. My targets are too easy: people who pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for a doodle by a sensationalist artist... |
|
| 10/02/2000 - The Invisible Candidate |
| "...politics - that is, the use of force - cannot make things better. Improvement is accomplished with anti-politics... that is, the private, personal efforts of millions of people working together cooperatively. |
|
| 09/30/2000 - The Daily Reckoning Weekend Edition |
| The Four 'E's logged a final day victory in round three of
their title bout for the Year 2000 this week - as worries
over energy, the euro, and earnings continued to hammer
the indexes. |
|
| 09/29/2000 - The Dragon's Day |
| "...God has a sense of humor too. And perhaps nothing is so amusing as collective madness. The sight of people spending fortunes to buy trash - one of the displays at the BAA show is described in the IHT as "a large pile of garbage" |
|
| 09/28/2000 - The "C" Spot |
| "...Mr. Nader is furious about campaign finance, along with - and this is a very incomplete list - the World Trade Organization, the death penalty, genetically engineered food, child poverty, the military budget, |
|
| 09/27/2000 - Berserking |
| "...'berserk' comes from ancient Norse. The Vikings would go 'berserking' - attacking an enemy with such wild fury that no reasonable man would want to be in their way. Collective thinking dominated the politics of the 20th century. |
|
| 09/26/2000 - Collective Action |
| "...collective thinking ... is what holds stocks at absurd levels. Imagine that there were no stock market and no collective thinking about stock investing. Who would pay $450 billion to buy Cisco? |
|
| 09/26/2000 - The Daily Reckoning Weekend Edition |
| The Bureau of much Labored Statistics reported Friday that
consumer prices fell in August for the first time in 14
years. Thursday, the PPI was down, too. |
|
| 09/25/2000 - In Praise Of Group Thinking |
| "...but if any one of them failed to do his duty...the whole formation was likely to disintegrate. |
|
| 09/23/2000 - The Daily Reckoning Weekend Edition |
| "We got a reprieve from the hangman today," says an
analyst in Reuters of Friday's action. The 'buy the dip'
crowd moved in at mid-session and brought the Dow to a
positive close - up 81 to 10,847... |
|
| 09/22/2000 - Pi In The Sky |
| "...in order to justify the stock price, the company would have to turn up the volume sales by approximately 14,200%. Maybe it will. But only if and when it does will the stock be worth what it is selling for today. |
|
| 09/21/2000 - Last Oozing Of The Dollar? |
| "...the very same IHT that gave me the news of the O's defeat, the breakup of the lesbian couple, and Krugman's comments also reports on page 13 that the "U.S. Trade Deficit Soars to Record $31.89 Billion. |
|
| 09/20/2000 - The Trouble With The Whole World |
| "...even free money failed to revive the Japanese economy or its stock market. Why? Digital Man is stumped. To him, everything works by simple cause and effect logic. |
|
| 09/19/2000 - What's Wrong With America |
| "...[Let's examine] one of Al Gore's favorite campaign targets: working families. 'Working family,' is of course, a meaningless abstraction. Families don't work. People work. |
|
| 09/18/2000 - The Trouble With Europe |
| "...once it is widely accepted that there is something wrong with Europe, the next question - 'what? - arises without begging. And answers present themselves like candidates for federal election - usually shallow, self-serving and stupid. |
|
| 09/15/2000 - The Major League |
| "...Gee, if dealing with gun-toters, assassins and kidnappers were so easy, how come Britain has been bogged down in Northern Ireland for a quarter of a century? |
|
| 09/14/2000 - Solomon's Porch |
| "... the Internet, the Solomon's Porch of the 21 century, seems to make it possible. All the world can now participate in the biggest market ever - like having the whole world gathered in a coffee-house in Amsterdam... |
|
| 09/13/2000 - Think Global, Act Loco |
| "...Christianity gathered supporters very slowly at first. It spread like a virus. From person to person, group to group. Finally, in about the year 321 it reached a kind of 'tipping point,' when Emperor Constantine converted. |
|
| 09/12/2000 - Oil Story |
| "...if you were cut off from the media, you would take little more notice of these price swings than of, say, your local town councilor being caught taking a bribe or your painting contractor mixing his metaphors. |
|
| 09/12/2000 - Sensation Mongers |
| ...once again, more brain time taken up with puerile malarkey. And yet, this is the way herd thinking works. If you pay attention to the popular media, you begin to think that these issues are important. |
|
| 09/09/2000 - The Daily Reckoning Weekend Edition |
| Even in Europe...all eyes remain on the Nasdaq. Um, just in
time, too. The index dropped below 4,000 for the first time
in two weeks on Friday, as investors dumped Big Techs. |
|
| 09/08/2000 - Endless Summer |
| "...recognizing the boom and bust character of the human personality, you can expect investment prices to follow a similar pattern. Occasionally, you will also see certain investments become popular sensations. |
|
| 09/07/2000 - Stroke Of Luck |
| "...movements in stock prices are more a product of what we don't know than what we do. New technology, interest rates, productivity - these objective conditions seem to excite human emotions... |
|
| 09/06/2000 - The Black Grim |
| "...to refresh a memory that probably neither of us ever had, the 1920s were Big Tech years too. The tech stocks of the day...radio...automobiles...electrical appliances and utilities...airplanes...and motion pictures...were driving the market up wildly. |
|
| 09/05/2000 - Rise Of The Network Commonwealth |
| "...political organizations of the 21st century are likely to be less concerned with geography. I can speak and do business with someone in New Zealand, over the Internet, more easily than I can deal with the guy in the apartment upstairs. |
|
| 09/04/2000 - Sin And Wickedness In The Marketplace |
| "...by contrast, what hurts you as an investor is what hurts you in the rest of life. Vanity: such as when you think you are smarter than other investors. Sloth: such as when you can't be bothered to study an investment before buying it. |
|
| 09/02/2000 - The Daily Reckoning Weekend Edition |
| Complex news for the workers' holiday: "Economy Seen
Slowing, Markets Joyous" a Reuters' headline tells... as
six Fed rate hikes from June '99 to May '00 appear to be
showing their mettle. |
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