Tuesday 5 October 1999
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Pic of the day: "Kill it, Alan! Come on, you can do it! With your bare
hands, right? You can do it? Come on, I bet on you and all!" ... Today I was decided to write the entire entry about Alan Greenspan, savior of the world economy. It's been a while since I've written a Greenspan entry, after all, and the chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve faces some tough decisions again. (Not for the first time.) But I reconsidered. I tend to do that a lot, reconsider. It is not uncommon that I write one entry and later a quite different one. And if not, I may still rewrite substantially. In fact I may rewrite, discard and write yet another. All to make sure that you, my faithful readers, get the best possible mix: The personal and the general, the happy and the worried, the smart and the stupid. Because that's how my life is.The reason why I thought of Mr Greenspan is the challenges to the American economy. Now the regular reader will have noticed that I live in Norway, in western Europe, which is not (yet) part of the US. Still, I consider Greenspan to be more important to the Norwegian economy than the current Norwegian government and its recently published budget proposal for the year 2000. Because if the American economy goes down, the entire world is in a shipload of trouble. Last time this happened on a really big scale, ca 1929, the world got the Great Depression and the sudden emergence of nazism and fascism. The casual reader may not be aware of any threat to the American economy. On the contrary, the USA has seen the longest un-interrupted run of growth since the war and then some. Inflation is low, or less than nothing if you consider the increased value of many goods. For instance, a computer or a car today may cost the same as a few years ago, but deliver a lot more value for that money. So official numbers tend to overstate inflation, it is probably negative. Fewer people are without work. In fact, in many places there is a shortage of skilled labor. Despite this, wages stay relatively unchanged. How could things possibly be better?Things could be better if prices of shares and property were realistic. Today these prices are not decided by the usefulness of those items, but by the future sales value. People do not buy shares to get a stake in the industry or to get a regular dividend, but to sell them to some greater fool, netting a profit. The same increasingly happens to houses and property. This is a Bad Thing. There is no need to believe me in this. I have seen it happen before on a smaller scale, in Norway in the 1980es. Japan is still struggling to recover, years after they did the same thing. And we need not mention the large stockmarket crash that led to the Great Depression ... I already pointed out that above. All of these had the same prehistory. Shares and property prices going up and up, people claiming that a new era was dawning and the old law of economics did not work anymore. And then suddenly gravity came back.What happens is that people borrow to buy stuff that is not worth it. You pay $200,000 for a house and the interest rates are low. Then all people at once find out that, uh, you cannot really get that much out of a house, better sell it now. And suddenly the house is only worth $100.000 and you have borrowed, like, $180.000. That sucks. Oh, and the interest rates have suddenly doubled. That really sucks. When this happens to millions of people at once, it sucks spectacularly. Which is why, somehow, Alan Greenspan has to get this trend to back slowly away without anybody getting hurt. I don't envy him. I doubt even I could have done that. ;) ... One thing I can do, however, is tell my fellow Norwegians that there are now some really cheap alternatives to the old almost-monopoly on Internet. I have already mentioned Sense Communications who allow surfing the Internet to the price of a local call. (Which sadly is far from free here in Norway - more like $1 per hour or so.) Recently the bonus card Domino has come up with an even better deal. It gives you not only surf at local call prices but also webspace ... 50 MB, which is more than almost anybody could legally use. (I do not plan to use it, partly for religious reasons. Domino is Latin and means "My Lord". I find this blasphemous in a commercial setting, and it reminds me uncomfortably of the Beast in Revelation and its commercial interests.)Luckily there now seems to be an even better deal: NetCom, famous for taking on the former monopoly on mobile phones, have expanded into wire-based telephony. They have now launched an Internet access where price depends on the time of day. From 24 till 06 the price is kr 0,05 per minute, ca 40 cent per hour. And no monthly fees, like I pay today at my old ISP. Personally I can't just make the jump, as I have this homepage in all the search engines and bookmarked by what few readers I have. I do consider moving it entirely over to crosswinds.net, though, and only leave pointers. Like I did with my Daggerfall site, and most of my archives. But it would take a time even so. I just got the last weekly statistics from my ISP, and there were 29 hits on my dagger.html page. Which has contained nothing but a pointer since spring, at least. Search engines are slow to update, and not all people know how to update a bookmark / favorite either. :) ... Now wasn't that a "balanced diet"? :) A bit for my Norwegian friends too. The statistics indicate that a rather large minority of my readers are still Norwegian. (Despite me writing exclusively in English.) The statistics are not very detailed, I just see the domain name and not who looks at what. Intriguing. For instance, as usual I have a few hits from the local newspaper in the nearest town. I have no idea who there logs on my site, when they do it, why, or even what pages they visit. Do they read my diary from time to time? If so, hi! :) Or is there a closet Daggerfall player visiting his old bookmarks? Female journalists reloading the picture of my famous yellow backside and perhaps looking for more? I shall never know. But it is certainly a fun hobby! |