>On Behalf Of Doug Henwood
> "Fussing" isn't the right word to describe what's happened in the
> U.S. stock market. The last several years have seen one of the great
> speculative manias of all time. There's just no other way to describe
> it. The first stage of the bull market, roughly the 1980s, was a
> fairly rational reaction to the rise in profitability, the fall in
> interest rates, and the political triumph of capital...
> That's when the bull market crossed the line from rational
> exuberance to irrational exuberance - sometime around 1995 or 1996.
Now, the last few years have obviously been an incredible run up stock
values, but there is a reasonable argument that there has also been an
incredible expansion of global expansion by US corporations, fueled by the
Internet-related technology explosion along with the general
hyperexploitation of the third world.
If the stock runup had continued at the 1995-1999 pace, it would obviously
be unsustainable, but the Dow and S&P 500 has been pretty stable for the
last year. The runup could reasonably be seen as a reevaluation of US
stocks based on realization of how technology and the global power of
exploitation that may flow to those controlling technology standards will
lock-in profits for the future.
I continue to be a bit skeptical of your focus on US wages, US interest
rates and other US stats when the operations and profit centers of these
multinationals are scattered across the globe. It's not that I buy the pure
rationality of the market (and I put the pure Internet stocks in this
category), but there seems to be some reasonable assumptions of capitalist
power backing up this stock runup.
-- Nathan Newman
