THE DOOM AND GLOOMERS
MAY HAVE HELPED US OUT
Well, now that we've reached mid-January and the world hasn't come to an end, it seems that maybe the gloom and doomers concerning Y2K may have actually helped us out.
You remember the gloom and doomers — those were the people who were storing food and water, buying generators, and generally preparing for life underground as the calendar, and therefore the nation's and the world's computers, rolled to 1-1-00. Y2K , as you know, was supposed to be a big problem. It was supposed to cause computers to misread the date and think it was 1900. That kind of confusion was, of course, supposed to bring our now computerized world to an almost screeching halt.
Of course, as we now all know, that really didn't happen. Oh, there may have been a computer glitch here or there, but basically, not only for our country, but perhaps more surprisingly, the rest of the world, everybody moved through the so-called crisis period rather uneventfully.
It must be remembered that, while the doomsday Y2K gloom and doomers took themselves very seriously, it was thought that most of the rest of us didn't. I, admittedly, was highly critical of those that thought things were going to go up in smoke. I conceded that there might be some small glitches, but I reminded our client investors, radio listeners, and you readers, that there are so-called computer glitches occurring in our country and the world everyday.
I'm sure that you've heard anecdotal stories about someone who got a hundred thousand dollar bill from the Electric Company or a million dollar check from the IRS. Somebody punched the wrong button or something went haywire; those kind of things happen on occasion and basically infrequently. My big fear was that anything that went wrong between December 30th and January 3rd or 4th would have automatically been blamed on Y2K, sending the nation's legal force into action, suing anybody and everybody for anything possible. To the legal fraternity's great disappointment, I'm sure, everything went smoothly, and thousands — if not hundreds of thousands — of potential lawsuits were avoided.
The point I'm leading up to in this essay is that I think the gloom and doomers may have actually done us a favor. Initially, back in 1998 when people first started to talk about the potential Y2K problem, most everybody didn't really take it seriously. Businesses generally thought they had fairly new computers, and how could anybody build a new computer a couple of years before the century change and not accommodate that change?
But the doom and gloomers persisted — they kept beating the drum, kept stirring us up, and kept worrying about it. And the more they talked about it and the more they worried about it, the more uneasy a lot of people became and the more the media jumped on the bandwagon and spread the Y2K "disaster" word.
But what came out of all this is that businesses did take it seriously in the end. They spent billions of dollars upgrading their computers and systems. Every piece of equipment was checked and double-checked, and in the end we moved through the Y2K experience uneventfully.
I really believe, in retrospect, that if the Y2K gloom and doomers hadn't made such a fuss, Y2K might have been a far bigger problem. Rather than continue to make fun of all those people with extra generators and extra water on hand, we ought to give them a big "THANK YOU". For in this case, their gloom and doomers probably helped us avoid a lot of trouble.
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Just a few words as we look ahead to 2000.
While the calendar may change, many of the fundamental driving forces behind the market will not vary that much. This year may not match last year's dazzling economic figures, which were, after all, the best in the last century. But technology and ensuing productivity increases will still be the driving forces of our economic growth, and that should still provide a very good economic background for a stock market that also may not match the last two years' dazzling performance, but will still produce credible gains.
(Tom Butenhoff is a First Vice President with J. E. Liss & Company in Milwaukee. The views are his and not necessarily those of Liss Financial Services or the Job Connection/Hiring Network.)