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A L S O__T O D A Y

"Myst" partnership is riven
By Karlin Lillington
Rand and Robyn Miller, the brothers who created the world's most popular computer games, go their separate ways
(03/02/98)

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T A B L E__T A L K

Is your computer ready for the year 2000? Discuss the millennium bug in Table Talk's Digital Culture area

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R E C E N T L Y

Talking 'bout my "Net generation"
By Andrew Leonard
Review of Don Tapscott's book "Growing Up Digital."
(02/27/98)

Hatch vs. Gates
By Marcia Stepanek
Senator says Microsoft demanded more sympathetic voices at next week's hearing -- or Bill Gates wouldn't show
(02/26/98)

A doctorate in "Doom"
By Moira Muldoon
For students at the world's first video game university, it's all math and little play
(02/25/98)

Let's Get This Straight
By Scott Rosenberg
The case of the hijacked haiku
(02/24/98)

Schools of hard knocks
By Andrew Leonard
"Lock ups" for "defiant teens" use questionable tactics -- on the Web and off
(02/23/98)

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BROWSE THE
21ST ARCHIVES

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Your book draws a lot of analogies with the crash of 1929, the bank holidays and the Great Depression that followed. How do you think the financial markets are going to handle the year 2000 problem over the next couple of years?

The thing that boggles my mind is that for the most part the Wall Street investment community does not have this on their radar screen. So they're busily buying and selling General Motors and IBM and everything and not saying, gee, I wonder if these companies are actually gonna be around? How much are they spending on year 2000? What kind of risk do they face?

It's possible that may pick up later in the year. Edward Yardeni, for instance, the chief economist at Deutsche Morgan Grenfell, argues that the SEC and NASDAQ are putting enough pressure on publicly traded companies that they're going to have to start disclosing their year 2000 expenditures. The savvy investors and Wall Street guys might start thinking, jeez, this could be a problem. The Warren Buffets of the world might start pulling out, and so on.

I don't think the general public is going to start to panic till much later. But Yardeni argues that you're going to see a 20 percent drop in the stock market in the second half of this year, in anticipatory reaction to year 2000 problems. Now the interesting thing about this as far as American psychology is, if I buy a bunch of emergency food today, I'm stockpiling -- but if I do it next year, I'm hoarding. In times of plenty no one seems to object to your buying extra supplies. If I want to take my money out of the bank this year, hey, it's not a problem. The thing that I'm watching for is whether the government will make some anticipatory decisions to prevent a run. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see a bunch of regulations put in at the end of this calendar year to say, you're absolutely prevented from taking out your IRAs and Keoghs. I wouldn't be surprised if the withdrawal penalty goes up from 10 to 50 percent next year.

"Time Bomb 2000" advises readers to consider taking steps like withdrawing money from the bank, moving away from big cities and stockpiling food. How are people reacting to that?

Six months ago, when we wrote the book, I had members of my extended family who said, oh, piffle, this is all ridiculous. But now fewer and fewer people are shrugging it off entirely, particularly as the story begins to enter the mainstream media. The thing that's most frustrating to me is to see reasonably intelligent people who will focus on it for a short period of time -- a few minutes, or for the extent of a half-hour TV show, and they say, wow, this is serious! And then they go on to the next crisis of the day: El Niño! Iraq! Monica Lewinsky! Or whatever. And by now they've forgotten.

If you think, well, my ATM card may not work for a couple of days, ehhh, big deal, I'll get $100 of cash. That's trivial. Planning for a one-month disruption requires some effort: You've got to save some money, you've got to stockpile some stuff, but you don't have to really change your lifestyle. Where it really gets serious is when you say, you know, this could be really bad for a year -- and if I want to survive I'm going to have to change my lifestyle in a non-trivial way.

Most people aren't willing to do that easily. And I put myself in that category. If I told you that San Francisco is going to burn to the ground, and for the safety of your family and yourself you're going to have to quit this job, find a job somewhere else, move to a different part of the country -- you can't just casually make that decision.

But I did get to that point about a year ago, on several different levels. We've sold our house in New York, bought a house in New Mexico. I'm out of the stock market.

The thing I keep trying to repeat to people who are willing to listen to this at all is that you've got options today: It's not pleasant to consider moving to a different town, but you can work that into a plan. But doing that in panic mode in '99 is going to be a whole different kettle of fish. Then it'll be a lot tougher -- because then you're part of the stampede. And unfortunately I think that's what's going to happen to the great majority of people.
SALON | March 2, 1998

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What's going to happen on Jan. 1, 2000? How will you prepare your computers, your work and your life? Come post in Table Talk's Digital Culture conversation area.