Executive Analysis #180

Dear Sir or Madam:

I wish you to reexamine the securities exchange structure regarding internet stocks: We're entering the digital-transmission world, where replication, alteration, and enhancement, are facilitated to the level of information-only: no things need exchange hands (not even CDROM's, but these are cheap, too).

Even the securities are moving to paperless modes. And while I think this is just neat, there is the overriding concern that generic man in the USA does not know how to move as fast as paperless data: Our money supplies have languished or rowsed according to beliefs, but, in pure data, money can re-move at the speed of light with no volumetric controls - a billion-dollars-there, just went-by because it said (informationed) so, and you didn't notice the slip.

Old-fashioned money had its natural and lawful mass regulations: You had to carry it in some bulk in your pocket, you drove it to the store, you had to wait for the cashier to count it, security guards in armoured trucks delivered bags of it, you waited for checks to clear.... But there's no rest-mass of money on the internet: computers can monitor and bid on the stock market as readily as surpassing people walking on a freeway! This is deemably dangerous: Inflation used to wait for money to circulate: Now circulation goes hyper: The actual money-flow is not strictly regulated by the actual money-supply, because flow is derivative (calculus sense) - other factors control time.

And that's the point: What other factors control time in the USA? That's your Securities Department's new responsibility, and the Treasury's.

And the first point implicated at the top of this message, is that, the products themselves are pure information: computer programs downloading as pure information, running on fairly inexpensive PC's at 75MHZ (1996), 150MHz (1997), 300MHz (1998), later this year 600MHz (1999), next year 1200MHz (2000). And the ease with-which these improvements appear is not only fast, but so-nearly unpredictable that not only insiders flail at the prospects, but results are nearly as calamitous as raw gambling likelihoods that a program will sell-big in a year of Market'99. It is foreseeably as unstable and as destabilizing.

The digital computer programming market almost does not need the Securities Exchange Commission: You likely will not move fast enough to regulate aught but a few stragglers who gambled bigger than others.

First, you should entirely automate stocks. 
Second, you should time-regulate transfers: 
if not in days-to-act, then days-of-return: 
that is, stock transactions are returnable, 
within a few days of initiating commitment. 
This may sound like a deliberate mess-up in 
organization, but it's more 'user-friendly' 
and more programmable: more is the merrier. 

And maybe also the Treasury should designate 
internet money as not-so-directly cashable - 
I have a proposal for 'pdqbanking' or 'FAD', 
fully accounted discounting, in that regard: 
where prices are stabilized, virtually real.

[index]

Sincerely.
Mr. Raymond Kenneth Petry
USA interParty

Firstly of the original 13 United States of America, self-stiled by our Articles of Confederation