On Mon, 15 Sep 2003 23:59:49 GMT, "Calif Bill"
wrote:

[snip]

The Federal Reserve has the ability to set margin requirements under it's
rules. How much margin is required. Forget which rules, but do a search on
Margin Requirements and Federal Reserve. He should have raised the margin
to 50 or even 90% of the purchase.

The number has been 50% since (IIANM) 1974.

What evidence do you have to show that margined trading has had anything to do
with the decline in stock prices?

In any case, whatever the Federal Reserve might have done with respect to margin
requirements is getting away from your earlier assertion: that "The election
debacle upset the market greatly." I'd still be interested in seeing the
performance of the DJIA on the dates you seem to be claiming that Al Gore "upset
the market," and that he "accelerated the slide that was already starting."

Would have stopped the Day Trader /
gambler operations. I think the Requirements were 10%, which says you have
to put up 10% of the purchase price.

Uh, no--unless there's some huge loophole I've never been made aware of.

His term was "irrational exuberance"
but was meaning an overheated / near out of control market.

I'd like to suggest that what he meant[1] was that the price of many
stocks--especially in the high-tech sector--was out of the realm of what made
economic sense. P/E ratios were all out of proportion on many of these stocks.
I think a better characterization of what he meant was that certain sectors of
the market were overbought. "Overbought" doesn't mean "out of control;" it may
simply mean "overdue for a correction."

But how is it that this correction--which you've just said could have been
avoided had Mr. Greenspan acted in the "correct" way--is attributable to Mr.
Gore's actions in the 2000 election? It seems to me that you've just laid the
blame in Reagan-appointed lap of Alan Greenspan.

The AGore election shenanigans meant extreme uncertainty. Who was going to
be President and set the policies for the next 4 years was at stake. This
meant real turmoil in the markets. Markets that were already falling. I
worked for a semiconductor company at the time and we were seeing lots of
order cancellations before the election from the Cisco's, etc. So you have
extreme uncertainty and falling orders,

But how is the correction in the high-tech sector attributable to Al Gore? I
think you still have to show that the market *was* "on the skids around the time
of the contested election. What were the closing figures during those days?

Stage for a real freefall, before
someone can get in and set policies.

So who would set these "policies?" What powers would they exercise to set them?
What would the effect have been? How do you define "freefall?"

So many questions, so little time...

Joe Parsons

And the greasing the skids (ways)
comment was exactly what I meant.

[1] It's important to keep a couple of things in mind with respect to Mr.
Greenspan: first, the things he says can and do move the markets. Second, he
purposely speaks in highly obtuse, ambiguous terms, which someone once named
"Greenspeak."