When a deflationary collapse finally comes, we shouldn't expect it to bring a flood of money-making opportunities, since it will not be the dot-com boom in reverse. There will be no instant billionaires unloading insider shares for 10,000 times what they paid for them. Students just out of college will not be jettisoning $60,000 jobs for a shot at 'real' money. Rank-and-file tech-firm workers will not be making plans to retire in their thirties to a life of exotic cruises, photo safaris and lucrative consulting jobs. And their spouses will not be tasked with calculating how much kitchen-remodeling $150,000 will buy. More likely is that it will prove to be the most difficult of times even for financial geniuses, who could find themselves challenged to hold onto a fraction of their current net worth. Will the 'smart money' shun distressed assets, recalling that even supposed blue-chip properties still had a long way to fall several years after the 1929 Crash? Some Will Flourish And yet, we know that among the economic survivors, there are certain to be a few who will not merely prosper but who will flourish. This point was driven home to me on Friday when I took my sons to an antique auto exhibit in San Francisco that contained some of the most jaw-droppingly ostentatious cars ever produced in the U.S.: the Packards, Pierce-Arrows, Marmons, Cords and Cadillacs that continued to roll off U.S. assembly lines even at the nadir of the Great Depression. The exhibit is owned by the San Francisco Academy of Art and is closed to the public, so we gawked through showroom windows on Van Ness Avenue. Speaking as a car buff, I have never before seen a more magnificent collection of beautifully detailed, lustrously restored, automotive rarities than this one. If Jay
LATEST TRADES
