Gone with the Wind(sors) heißt es im UK.:-)

Die Schicksals-Story von Irving Fisher war mir neu!
Hier kann man mit Freude immer noch was lernen. Danke Boss Cube.
André
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>GONE WITH THE WIND
>THE DAILY RECKONING
>PARIS, FRANCE
>WEDNESDAY, 24 JANUARY 2001
>* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
>*** Another rate cut coming? Investors think so...and they
>think they know what it will mean...
>*** Fed in Bubble Mode...Bush's tax cut... what budget
>surplus?
>*** Gold derivatives...lost in the forests...collector
>cars...and French mistresses...
>*** Investors are looking forward to next week. The FOMC
>meets and is widely expected to cut the Fed Funds rate by
>50 basis points. Futures trading shows investors put an 86%
>probability on a rate cut of 50 bps.
>*** Over the last 18 years, investors have learned that it
>is usually unprofitable to fight the Fed. When the Fed cuts
>rates - stocks rise.
>*** And so, in anticipation of another breath of hot air
>into the bubble economy, investors boosted up the Dow by 71
>points and the Nasdaq by 82. There was not much rhyme or
>reason to it - other than the hope that things will be
>better now that Greenspan & Co. are back on the pumps.
>***"No matter what you read or hear about widespread
>bearish sentiment," Marc Faber wrote recently,"the fact is
>that investors and strategists have remained stubbornly
>optimistic... brokerage industry strategists are now
>allocating a record 64.7% of their clients' assets to the
>stock market, which is by far the highest in the history of
>this indicator. [And according to Investors Intelligence]
>...52.9% of advisers are bullish, which is just within 4%
>of the all-time high figure in January and March of last
>year..."
>*** The Fed is in bubble mode. MZM (money of zero
>maturity...or cash as it is commonly called) is rising
>almost 5 times as fast as the economy itself...that is, at
>a 12.9% annual rate. Adjusted reserves are soaring at a
>16.7% annual rate.
>*** This is, of course, inflation: more money relative to
>the goods and services that it can buy. Will it produce an
>increase in the consumer price index? An increase in stock
>prices? Or nothing at all?
>*** While the Fed tries to pump up the bubble economy...
>there are still some serious leaks. Earnings, debt,
>bankruptcies. If investors lose confidence - they can whack
>the markets for a 10%...20%...or even 50% loss in a matter
>of days.
>*** Let's go back to the big numbers. The stock market is
>worth $14 trillion. Even a 10% drop would mean a loss of
>capital (money) equal to $1.4 trillion. How much would a
>12.9% increase in MZM offset that? Not much, dear reader,
>not much.
>*** And, there's Bush's tax cut. There's another $500
>billion that might be made available to consumers...that
>should get the bubble air stirring, right? But, again, it
>represents less than a 5% move in stock prices. When this
>market is ready to go down...neither rate cuts nor tax cuts
>are going to stop it.
>*** Is it ready to go down now? Well, not yesterday. Twice
>as many stocks rose as fell on the NYSE yesterday. 140 hit
>new highs, while only 7 hit new lows.
>*** In Bill Clinton's final budget, a federal surplus is
>projected of $4.42 trillion for the years 2001-2010. But
>economists at Economy.com say that the figure will be more
>likely $1.8 trillion. And that it won't be a surplus, they
>predict, but a deficit. All you have to do, says
>Economy.com, is change a few of the assumptions about the
>stock market over the next few years and you get a very
>different result.
>*** The NY Conference Board's Index of Leading Indicators
>fell for the 3rd month in a row. It dropped 0.6% in
>December, its sharpest decline in 5 years. Three
>consecutive months of falling figures is usually an advance
>warning of recession.
>*** Here's another interesting note to log in the"Too Big
>To Fail" category:"Bank One's bad consumer loans were 61%
>higher last quarter than they were the previous year,"
>reports the Motley Fool."Additionally, Bank One took a
>pre-tax write-down of $575 million for currently impaired
>assets, including vacant real estate and abandoned car
>leases."
>*** Friend Justin Ford writes:"The nation's plummeting
>savings rate is not a new phenomenon... did you know,
>Irving Fisher died penniless? Apart from being the Fed
>chairman during the '29 crash, Fisher was a renowned Yale
>economics professor and entrepreneur in the 1920s and
>1930s. He had built a multi-million dollar fortune. But he
>also neglected basic lessons about investing... Yale had to
>buy the house he was living in so he could live out the
>rest of his days there." Justin's been working on a program
>called 'Seeds of Wealth' designed to help young people
>learn the value of saving and investing. I'll tell you more
>about it later.
>*** The dollar went nowhere yesterday. Oil fell 23 cents.
>*** The Bank of England's gold auction was oversubscribed 5
>times over. There were plenty of buyers for gold - but the
>price of the metal fell 30 cents yesterday. The mining
>index, XAU, lost 2%.
>*** Marshall Auerbach, on the uncalculated threat of
>derivatives:"Ashanti Gold, a large West African gold
>producer, was not the first mining company to enter into
>gold hedging arrangements via the OTC derivatives market.
>But the derivatives used by Ashanti to undertake such
>hedging were unusually complex... to the extent that
>nobody in the marketplace could truly understand them.
>Investors were fobbed off with the argument that the
>company had the situation 'well in hand', when questions
>about these exotic hedges were posed.
>*** Then,"when the European central banks surprised the
>gold market in the autumn of 1999," continues Auerbach,
>"with the announcement of the Washington Accord (an
>agreement to restrict the amount of gold sold by the
>European central banks to a fixed quantity over the next 5
>years), the gold price soared un unprecedented $80 in just
>4 trading days. Unfortunately for both [Ashanti] and its
>shareholders, Ashanti's derivatives' bet did not
>incorporate this sort of rapid price spike as one of a
>possible range of scenarios... the resultant margin calls
>pushed the company to the brink of bankruptcy. Seventeen
>major bullion banks had exposure to Ashanti, yet NONE were
>able to quantify the extent of their liabilities until one
>of the Goldman Sachs's 'rocket scientists', who helped
>design the original derivatives contracts for Ashanti, was
>parachuted across the Chinese Wall and able to make the
>relevant calculations.
>*** And yet,"OTC derivatives in the gold market," says
>Auerbach,"are but a tiny irrelevance in relation to the
>trillions of dollars of exposure in the area of interest
>rate and foreign exchange derivative structures..." (see:
>The Great Looming Threat To Financial Markets
>http://www.dailyreckoning.com/body_headline.cfm?id=890)
>***"The world of Wall Street spin is like a dozen
>simultaneous games of 3-dimensional chess," writes Howard
>Kurtz in his book Fortune Tellers, passed on to me by Harry
>Schultz,"...a dizzying match in which stock prices,
>corporate earnings & millions of individual investments are
>riding on the outcome. Amid the endless noise, whom do U
>trust?... Street analysts have too much power, for the
>media mindlessly trumpets their predictions as if set in
>stone. And if the assessment turns out badly wrong, well,
>too bad. Zero accountability."
>*** Schultz adds:"Analysts praise company stocks while
>trying to win that firm's investment banking biz, & few
>make the connection. Via airwaves & press, fund managers
>tout stocks in which they're long. Rarely are they asked if
>they own the stock, & even if they admit it, no one
>screams: interest conflict!"
>***"Martha Stewart Living has swept Wall Street off its
>feet right along with the rest of the world," says
>GrantsInvestor analyst Rosa Ann Tortora."But as cracks
>begin to show in this fabulous facade, investors may want
>to reconsider their paean to gracious living." The company
>currently trades with a p/e of 55 and a $1 billion market
>cap. But, according to Rosa Ann, Martha's Internet project
>is hemorrhaging cash. And she thinks there's some money to
>be made on the short side. (see: Running Out Of Style?
>http://www.dailyreckoning.com/body_headline.cfm?id=889)
>*** The collector car market is still hot, says the Arizona
>Republic. Two recent auctions produced record sales and
>turnout. A '34 Ford street rod built by Boyd Coddington
>sold for $130,680. A '35 Duesenberg sold for $1.045
>million. A '68 Shelby GT500KR sold for $85,575.
>*** A front-page article in The International Herald
>Tribune warns that Europe's forests are in bad shape.
>Nowhere does the paper explain that European forests are
>victims of European government - which pays farmers to
>plant unprofitable crops on land that would otherwise go
>back to wilderness.
>*** And poor Christine Deviers-Joncour. The woman was paid
>$9.25 million dollars by oil company Elf Aquitaine. And now
>she is being forced to explain to a court why her services
>were so valuable. The money, it is alleged, was a bribe to
>former French foreign minister Roland Dumas, to whom she
>was mistress. Christine says she worked tirelessly for the
>money. Yes, Judge Sophie Portier said:"You put your body
>and soul into the job."
>GONE WITH THE WIND
>"There's just as much money to be made in the wreck of a
>civilization as the up-building of one."
> Rhett Butler
>
>In ante-bellum Georgia, few people could imagine what a war
>with the North might bring. They knew wars took courage...
>horsemanship...and discipline. They figured they had
>plenty, and boasted, in the words of one of the Tarleton
>boys in Margaret Mitchell's novel, that they could"lick
>the Yankees in less than a month."
>But it was not to be. After 4 years of struggle, the south
>was beaten, devastated, and occupied by a foreign army. It
>was a new era, after all.
>Things do change. New Eras do come along, but only at great
>cost...and unexpected suffering.
>"Practically breaking the bank with a $3 million publicity
>campaign," reports Frederick Sheehan in his Quarterly
>Market Review for John Hancock,"Warner Brothers' escapade
>swept the nation."
>Sheehan was not referring to 'Gone With The Wind,' which we
>made our entertainment last Saturday night, but to another
>film which revolutionized the movie industry - The Jazz
>Singer, the first talking picture, released by the then
>third-rate studio, Warner Brothers.
>"Predictions for this new technology were mixed," writes
>Sheehan."The reasons for this ambivalence were many,
>including the terrible quality of the sound." Said Tallulah
>Bankhead of the audio:"They made me sound as if I'd been
>castrated."
>But you can't stop a good innovation. Soon,"everyone in
>Hollywood was...scrambling for money, and in the heat of
>the bull market, it was easy enough to borrow and then
>borrow some more. By 1933, the technology was standardized
>and much improved, 99.5% of all movies were now
>'talkies'..."
>If ever there was a new technology that was a winner - it
>was talking pictures. We do not have to consult the dusty
>tomes of economists for proof. Nor do we need to stretch
>our imaginations. All we have to do is to open our eyes.
>Everywhere you go in the world, or nearly everywhere, you
>find U.S.-made movies. It is Planet Hollywood. American
>movies...and the actors and actresses who make them...are
>known worldwide. They are among our most successful and
>most profitable exports.
>The old era of silent films fell faster than the
>confederacy. Only a few years after the introduction of
>'talkies' they were being watched by crowds of millions.
>Even Josef Stalin loved American films. He worked until the
>wee hours of the morning - personally approving the lists
>of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people who were to be
>murdered. Then, his labors finally over for the day, he
>retired with a few henchmen to a private studio...not to
>discuss Karl, but to watch Groucho.
>Surely investors who put their money in this world-changing
>new technology were richly rewarded. Alas...what a
>confusing, frustrating...and astonishingly baroque world we
>live in. Sheehan reports that by 1933,"the entire motion
>picture industry had defaulted on its debt (there was one
>exception: Loews). The studios struggled to survive."
>What went wrong? The studios were trapped by technology as
>well as enriched by it. They were forced to invest huge
>amounts of money [like today's telecoms or Internets?] in
>order to remain competitive."They had no choice," explains
>Sheehan."Profits of the industry tripled between 1927 and
>1929. They had achieved this apparent success, but at an
>enormous cost....The industrial system as it had evolved
>for the previous three decades needed to be completely
>overhauled; studios and theatres had to be totally re-
>equipped and creative personnel retrained or fired. In
>order to fund this conversion, the film companies were
>forced to borrow $350 million. What William Fox and Sam
>Warner did not anticipate was a stock market crash."
>One of the myths that has grown up around the Depression
>was the audiences turned to the film industry for
>entertainment and escape. Maybe so...but going to the
>movies was discretionary spending...and sales dropped for
>the motion pictures just as they did for the auto industry.
>In 1931, movies brought in $831 million. By 1933, sales had
>fallen to $546 million.
>Even on a VCR, the sunsets, fires and panoramas of"Gone
>With the Wind" are impressive. They are the work of one of
>the greatest success stories in Hollywood - the Technicolor
>Corporation. Formed in 1915, the company had a monopoly on
>supplying color to the film industry. After the spectacular
>success of 'Gone with the Wind' and the 'Wizard of Oz,'
>both made in 1939, movies began a conversion to color almost as
>rapid as the switch to talkies in 1927. Technicolor was the
>sole supplier of color to Hollywood until 1947. Still,
>against the current of falling stock prices on Wall Street,
>Technicolor could make no progress. The stock never
>recovered to its '20s high.
>"In the end," comments Barrie Wigmore in his book,"The
>Crash and Its Aftermath," the movie industry thrived, the
>Warners and the Foxes retained control, but the investors
>went broke."
>Fox Films hit a high of $106 in 1929. By 1933, you could
>buy it for 75 cents. RKO fell from $76 in '29 to 25 cents
>in 1932. Warner Brothers dropped from $67 to 50 cents.
>The money investors put up - funding the development of
>some of the most successful new technologies for one of
>America's most profitable new industries - was lost. Like
>the Old South, it was gone with the wind.
>Bill Bonner


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