Aquarian Weekly 1/10/01
REALITY CHECK

TRIMMING THE FAT
FROM THE FIRE

"But what is Hope? Nothing but the paint on the face of Existence; the least touch of truth rubs it off, and then we see what a hollow-cheeked harlot we have got hold of." - Lord Byron

The year 2000 was a shitty one for Wall Street. Not to say that it was in the level of shit as 1987 or even 1929 when words like Satan and suicide ran roughshod through the high rollers and slander and begging became the hobbies of the day. No, 2000 was merely shitty, and to hear the econo-lads, dressed in their power suits of armor tell it, there hasn't been a follow-up year since 1945 that hasn't blossomed from such a healthy dose of fertilizer.

Money, after all, has legs. It learns to bounce and has survived much worse hits. So they tell us the sun will indeed come up tomorrow and 2001 could prove historical for all the right reasons. Meanwhile, the best and brightest sell off their heretofore fortunes like seized property at an IRS auction.

The dotcom revolution, as most revolutions, has had its share of martyrs. Many have abandoned their once unsinkable vessels and traded their Mercedes for a first class ticket to a remote corner of Peru where a 12" hunting knife and the industrial-sized can of mace are worth more than a team of accountants and stammering coke fiends masquerading as stockbrokers. But the poor souls still left to breathe in the foul stench of defeat instead choose to smell wondrous roses. They send memos to press offices everywhere decrying the hint of bankruptcy and speak of world peace as if it is attached to an affordable airline ticket.

But they lie. Many don't even know it yet, but losing that much money that fast leaves a sort of pale, sunken hue to the collective face, a powerful grip on the intestines that rips up into the brain and gives off the false sense of endorphins. The painful result of this is chairman and CEO of Priceline.com, Richard Braddock blathering on for 40 uninterrupted minutes of MSNBC airtime throwing out vapid concepts like "liquid funds" and "projected upswings" when he should be quoting from the heavy passages of Revelation with a .44 Magnum pressed to his temple.

Exactly one year ago Amazon.com founder, Jeffrey Bezos was Time magazine's Person of The Year and 20% of the ads on the all-important Super Bowl list, snatching a record $2.2 million for 30 seconds of CBS network time, were web sites. Four months later those same companies reported 70% loses. By spring tech stocks took a monumental beating and the word last summer was that the formally entrenched Internet-business wave had hit a terminal low tide and the wounded prognosticators, who once laughed at the steady oil market, were watching in horror as the see saw tipped hard.

It was about that time when my discussion with Wall Street Jovial's Dave Gahary hit the stands, ("How The Gravy Train Skids" Issue 4/19/00) and the demented Internet publisher ended one of several doom-struck diatribes with the now infamous quote, "Very little about the structure of the stock market could be considered legitimate," which rings more true today than it did 13 months ago.

Politicians like to use the word Recession when things get as bad as they have been over the past ten months. Jimmy Carter liked to use that one while people were trading brass-knuckle blows on mile-long gas lines and the American dollar was a worthless scrap of toilet paper abroad. Carter didn't survive that kind of ugliness. He never heard the piper's dirge. People close to the numbers know what went down then, and they damn well know now that unless the government starts drilling every inch of Alaska gas prices will not resemble anything called normal before Memorial Day. And in its wake whatever lunacy the George Bush administration will be running past Congress in the way of a $1.3 trillion tax cut will seem like slapping a band-aid on a severed head.

Three days before sending this to press a colleague described to me the current NASDAQ disaster as "fake money being poured into a vat of speculative horse dung", implying, I believe, that a whole lot of people can presently feel comfortable referring to themselves as first-class suckers being fleeced by the age-tested "get-rich-quick" scheme. This scenario had been laid out quite nicely by Internet Week's Bill Frezza last April with "The Rube Effect", a neatly described con devised by the excitable voices on the other end of the telephone who convince Johnny House Payment that hillside bungalows in Malibu are ripe to be had for someone possessing "the balls to go and get it." Frezza compared the doomed 1980s' bond market to the tech stock boom of the late 90s', but with the utmost respect for Mr. Frezza and PT Barnum, suckers have been around since humans could scrape crude drawings on cave walls, and they are, without question, an integral part of any solid economy, yet they are not sufficient excuses for such a swift and savage decline in profits.

Junk bonds and illegal backbiting hardly explain away several years of growing profits and perennial companies jumping onboard the information highway like frat- house drunkards road tripping. This was a real boom, not some Harold Hill morality scam, and there is a long line of the "smart people" who will argue that point, if you can get them on the phone between bale-outs.

One of those is the venerable Father Finucane whose been vaguely impersonating a man of the cloth for nearly a decade while gambling with trusted yuppie funds and cashed savings bonds. The good Father's answer to this mess is simple, but effective. If the law of nature is chaos, then roll with it. No reason to argue with circumstance when it is clear that God's plan is to close doors while opening others. To that end he has devised several plans revolving around dynamite and vacant ATM machines with "light security." He is a maverick in a land of followers and his days among the free are numbered, but he is right for these times.

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