I've been thinking about extraordinary phenomenon of the American Middle Class vis a vis its ability to generate billions of dollars, millions of votes, and thousands of theories.
Most of those theories today, or at least half, are centered around a number of objections to our involvement in Iraq which are sustainable only in an atmosphere of domestic tranquility. It brings to mind the parallels between this time and that of the internet stock bubble.
In those days, a pearl of wisdom I kept in my shirt pocket was this: When even your shoeshine boy is telling you which stocks to pick, it's time to get out of the market. As a fairly newly minted member of the investor class, and a devotee to thestreet.com, I was one of the fortunate ones, for a time. I had the advantage of actually working in Silicon Valley and a career in the software business. So I knew a good product when I saw one, and in those days, that was enough. I made a fortune for my broker and many of his wealthy clients by famously picking Inktomi and Akamai. I also picked a smashingly great loser in General Magic, but on the whole I made a nice pile for myself.
At the time I was working for a solid software company that was not benefitting from the high falutin' language and hype. We actually made products that the Fortune 500 purchased, although not in multi-million dollar orders. There were several clues that we were in a period of irrational exuberance, among which was an unusual encounter I had with a cat named Bernstein who was in the investment biz. It turns out that he has a rather reputable firm named after him. We were on a small plane heading to Vail and he was deep inside of a thick history book. Everything about him spoke 'long view'. I mentioned that our company was traded on the NASDAQ. A shadow of disappointment crossed his face. Simply stated, there's business and then there's real business. Mr. Bernstein goosed me along the road to understanding why the NYSE is called the Big Board.
One of the most annoying things about working in Silicon Valley, indeed in the software industry, is that if you are a conservative as I am, you tire quickly of working for people who are only 4 or 5 years your senior. One of the most seasoned managers I ever worked for was probably 15 years older. Everyone seemed short-sighted; everyone seemed hell-bent on reinventing the wheel, but this time in java, or this time 'on-demand', or this time via 'n-tier architecture'. The software industry was like a pop music chart.
Today, people who continue to parse the daily pronouncements of the candidates appear to me to be the political equivalents of day traders. A motley bunch of foolish prognosticators if there ever was one. I would like to have the historical perspective of Mr. Bernstein these days. Indeed I am really not spending much time looking at the races. But it is not only this daily minutia that annoys, it is the blindness that attention implies, and I think that too many Americans are being blind to what our new reality will be, just as many day traders were blind to the inevitability of a bursting bubble.
Just like day traders, people who have decided to be bullish on Kerry have, like day traders, micromanaged every little small bit of bad news that comes through their televisions and sold the President short. It is a risk, as I said, that can be maintained only in these days of relative calm. One of these days, some terrorist is going to drop a bomb on this nice dream. On that day, the bubble will be burst.
I believe that like day traders, those who are now making so much political noise will leave the market as quickly as they came in. A quarter of the blogosphere will go dark, and the daily volume of piecemeal kibbitzing will die down. I wish there were some other way to accomplish that, but I don't believe there is. Whether it is Kerry or Bush in the White House on that fateful day, the yammering will cease, and the long term thinkers will once again have a say.
The death of Paul Nitze the other day reminds us of how difficult it is to actually accomplish great things in geopolitical terms, and what level of complexity the big boys play. While we amateurs in the blogosphere have our turn in the spotlight, our run on the political NASDAQ, surely our betters watch in astonishment at our irrational exuberence. The very idea that the blogosphere will replace CBS sounds exactly like those Silicon Valley predictions that Brick & Mortar was a thing of the past. And when every blogger is a political pundit, like every programmer was a stock picker, it's time to get out of the overheated market.
So I hope I don't disappoint too many folks as I shift focus in the blog to other matters than the daily political spin, but I've had enough of it, and I don't think it's helping anyone to parse this stuff too closely. Especially since:
- Nobody is thinking about a solution to our southern immigration problem.
- The War on Global Narcoterrorism has taken a back seat.
- There is money to be made in China (for me).
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