nt generation." The Great Depression of the 1930s was a collective trauma which influenced people's mentality and behavior, but which influence has now diminished. As it has diminished, our confidence in our control over the economy gotten a lot bigger There is a great deal of fear of a crash, yet little is being actually said in the open. People act like they would rather not think about it. Many people are calling upon superstitious beliefs and spurious notions like the popularity of body piercing or some grand cosmic event. Looking at the DJIA trend line, it is obvious that the DJIA is due for a decline. "The question is not whether the stock market will decline, but whether it will survive as a long- term system that is doable for the next century. All systems have a period of growth and a period of decline. The stock market has been growing exponentially, doubling every 15 years or so, for the past century. Like a dinosaur, it has grown so large that the earth can no longer support it. An asteroid impact, they say, led to the extinction of the dinosaurs, but their path to extinction started long before that. Many other animals survived the impact. In fact, the rate of species extinction on our earth at current dwarfs the rate at the time of the extinction of the dinosaurs." The stock market is only viable in a growing economy. Investors do not want to lose money in a shrinking economy. In order to preserve the stock market, we have "grown" the economy in a very deliberate fashion during the 1990's. Part of this growth is based on world population growth, the development of markets and sources of labor in Third World countries, and the squandering of non-renewable resources and the world ecology. Over the next twenty years, the population will surpass the limit of supportability, just as the market economy has already passed the limit of support beyond the n...
