The Daily Reckoning Weekend Edition

Dear Daily Reckoning Reader,

One of great joys I get from writing the Daily Reckoning is regular correspondence with readers. I spend hours reading and responding to e-mails and personal letters I receive. My errors are corrected and I am rewarded with new ideas and insights. Books that I had not discovered on my own are suggested to me.

You see, one of the truly difficult tasks of putting out a daily e-mail is… there isn’t enough time! Time to correspond. Time to think. Time to read… and still manage to have time to mess up my personal affairs.

And recently I’ve been made aware that it can be quite taxing on your end, too. We cover a lot of ground during the week. Especially when there’s so much going on in the markets. I’ve been told on several occasions, that it is difficult – even if you enjoy the reading – to keep up with the Daily Reckoning every day.

Recently, a reader suggested we digest our daily efforts. Not just the Daily Reckoning e-mail message you receive every day, but the many, many articles my staff and I post to the Daily Reckoning web-site every week; articles that illustrate, illuminate and further define the ideas I discuss in the Daily Reckoning…

A weekly digest? Hmmmm… It sounded like an excellent idea to me.

So I gave the project to my trusty assistant, Addison Wiggin. He will be writing, editing and presenting to you the Daily Reckoning Weekend Edition. In it you will find the kind of commentary, ideas, insights and observations you’ve come to expect from the Daily Reckoning… and the investment advice from analysts such as the Fleet Street Letter’s Lynn Carpenter and Real Asset Investor’s Dan Ferris.

You’ll find the first edition below. As with the Daily Reckoning – it’s free. And for now, we aren’t even going to subject you to advertisements… although I can’t promise that will last. One must earn one’s keep, somehow.

Still for now, I hope you enjoy Addison’s efforts. If you wish to continue receiving the Weekend Edition – do nothing… you are already on the list. If however, you wish to only receive the Daily Reckoning as you have in the past, simply send an e-mail to unsubweekendedition@agora-inc.com and type the “unsubscribe” in the subject line.

Your humble scribbler, Bill Bonner

THE DAILY RECKONING

WEEKEND EDITION

JULY 1, 2000

PARIS, FRANCE By Addison Wiggin MARKET REVIEW: DOW up… barely

Late Friday, stocks rallied… but the gain was barely worth mentioning. Rallying in the final hour of trading, the Dow closed at 10,447.89. For the week, the index was up just 43.10. The Nasdaq rose 88.88 for the day and 120.77 for the week, to close at 3,966. Broader stock indicators also closed marginally higher. The S&P was up a miniscule 12.21 to… 1,454.60. INSIGHTS, NEWS and HEADLINES:

The Demise of the Greater Fool

by Brian Durrant

Once the greater fool vanishes, investors are forced to think more closely about their investments. Where will you sell your stock if you were the last to get in?

Natural Gas Panic: Get Ready to Take Profits

by Dan Ferris

Climbing prices. Falling reserves. This market is a speculator’s dream. Real Asset Investor readers have already taken 81% on one producer. But we’re ready to sell – for even more. Creative Destruction is Alive and Well On-line by Doug Casey

An “unauthorized freelance project” by some kids working for AOL threatens both CISCO and behemoth search engines like Yahoo! Learn how to profit during the destructive phase of the “New Economy”.

Ag-Biotech is Inevitable… As are Profits

by James Passin

Despite reactionary terrorism by European eco-marxists, the revolution in Agricultural Biotechnology has been a great success – to the benefit of millions of hungry people… and hungry investors. Headaches, Bad Tempers… Ahh, the News

by Lynn Carpenter

Investing is a long-term proposition. Nothing’s so sure you can “set it and forget it,” but you’d do better to pay a whole lot less attention to your stocks every day. There’s Something Wrong with the BLS Data

by Raymond F. Devoe Jr.

Fudging can only go on for so long-until the data are totally discredited as unreal… or just wrong. Then the true state of the economy will come out.

And in case you missed it…

THIS WEEK IN THE DAILY RECKONING

By Bill Bonner

06/30/00 RATIONAL FOOLS

“…we humans flatter ourselves. Endowed with the power to reason, we believe ourselves superior to the rest of the animal kingdom. But every dog, horse, rat and cow that saw Napoleon’s grand armee or Hitler’s Wermacht pass must have had better sense. Even a field mouse might be said to have been better programmed than a field marshal. Scurrying to safety as the troops passed…” 06/29/00 FOOLS’ GOD “…nor does everything come from power of reason alone. The rational mind is worshipped as though it were man- kind’s salvation. But in many cases, reason is a trap…and those people most gifted at it are often the most easily snared…” 06/28/00 GOD’S FOOLS

“…the idea of the greater fool concept is that no matter what price you pay for a stock, there is usually someone willing to pay a higher price. In a bull market – that is, a time of rising expectations and rising euphoria – there are plenty of fools, both great and small. But eventually, the greatest fool of all steps into the market…” 06/27/00 THE SUMMER OF LOVE

“…thus has the ‘summer of love’ begun. With the deepest secrets of life itself mapped out for all the world to see. And its deepest mysteries still yearning to be discovered. All the world will be able to see the genome…”

06/26/00 ROAD KILL “…real revolutions don’t come along very often. When they do, the instinctive behavior of hundreds or thousands of years – the institutions that have evolved over the centuries – may become a liability, rather than an asset. Revolutions are dangerous…”

FLOTSAM AND JETSAM

– Excerpted from Doug Casey’s International Speculator

“Kropotkin, like myself, was a minimalist when it comes to arbitrary political laws. If he’d had a car I suspect he’d have toyed with the idea of displaying the bumper sticker reading “Gravity: It’s a law we can live with”: [Rebels] see a race of law-makers legislating without knowing what their laws are about; today voting a law on the sanitation of towns, without the faintest notion of hygiene, tomorrow making regulation for the armament of troops, without so much as understanding a gun; making laws about teaching and education without ever having given a lesson of any sort, or even an honest education to their own children; legislating at random in all directions, but never forgetting the penalties to be meted out to ragamuffins, the prisons and the galleys, which are to be the portion of men a thousand times less immoral than these legislators themselves. All this we see and, therefore, instead of inanely repeating the old formula “Respect the law,” we say “Despise the law,” and all its attributes. In place of the cowardly phrase “Obey the law,” our cry is “Revolt against all laws.”

– Peter Kropotkin, Law and Authority, 1886 Mencken looks at it from a different, but similar, viewpoint: It is the fundamental theory of all the more recent American law…that the average citizen is half- witted, and hence not to be trusted to either his own devices or his own thoughts. -H.L. Mencken