I think I understand the conservative hands off, smaller government, get out of my face and lower my taxes. The US has done so much that plain isn't smart. I don't think we need smaller government but I think both sides can agree we need smarter government.
I just heard that Amtrak is being subsdized at a major loss and because of the politics, they keep getting the subsidies even when it makes no sense. They have long distance train tickets that are 2x, 3x the price of airfare, they don't allow pets on trains and so on and it takes forever. So obviously that form a travel is just not going to be used. That just is not wise, not responding to real market conditions.
How do we get smart government when it comes to these sorts of economic subsidies in the national interest? Out of the hands of our lobbyist ridden Congress and to an agency but then an administration can plunder an agency as the Bush administration has done.
All blog posts should be majority original material. Do not in essence repost articles and put a few comments around someone else's writing. If you want to do that, use the forums. They go to the Instapopulist as well as the main RSS feed but please do not post these as blogs for blogs are on the front page.
Please only quote small sections of other's writings to comply with copyrights on material.
Format your posts! Raw links not only look bad, they do not format correctly in RSS feeds. Do NOT post unformatted raw links (URLs)!
Quality blog posts are one of the reasons more people are coming to the site.
Please review the user guide for details on how to format your post.
Finally check your spelling and grammar! I am seeing major spelling and grammar mistakes in posts. Folks you are citizen journalists and this site allows you to have a front page voice. Please write quality posts in response.
This site has a rating system, by users and I will start to enforce removing such blogs off the front page through the rating system if we continue to get these kind of blog posts. It reduces the quality of the site and if you want to be heard....you must write quality, in depth, correct spelling, grammar and correctly formatted writings.
Firefox has a spelling checker build in and IE7 has an add on to check your spelling. The WYSIWYG editor also has a spell checker for IE7.
"What’s striking about the new rule is how it came about. Instead of releasing a draft and soliciting comments from the public – the typical process for governmental rule changes – DHS cited a clause in the Administrative Procedures Act, which is reserved for emergencies, to make the rule effective immediately."
Something you never hear the free marketeers talk about is the success of Conrail
In the mid 70's congress took over the assets of several bankrupt railroads to form Conrail. it was rough going at first, but over time it became profitable and well run organization, that was later able to be sold at a profit to the taxpayers to Norfolk Southern and CSX. CSX on the other hand, was run by John Snow, former Bush treasury secretary, and during his tenure had one of the worst maintenance and safety records of all the major railroads.
What would make sense to me would be a conrail style takeover of GM, turn it around then eventually sell off to a worthy buyer - such as Canadian auto parts giant Magna for example that unfortunately lost out to Cerberus in the Chrysler buyout bid
This can be done and works when you buy hard assets, such as railroad property and equipment - items with value, or in the case of auto - physical plant, captial equipment, inventories and intellectual property. Why it doesn't work well with finacial institutions is that the "assets" are largely paper, that can become completely worthless in the blink of an eye.
Toyota has not been immune from the slowdown - they had their worst sales quarter in a decade. they are now offering incentives - almost unheard of for japanese brands
They too are doing the very US branded thing and making big gas guzzling SUVs and trucks as well
and their flagship Corrolla is bigger and heavier and worse gas mileage than it used to be.
Quality rating agencies have also noted declines in the quality of Toyota and other import brands
they have already scaled back their aggressive US plant building plans and are even rumored to be considering closing some of their older facilities like Princeton IN
While it's all very well and fine to say that the US is better off without GM, I think that statements of this sort are most often based in ignorance, not fact.
Consider.
1) If there is not GM, a vital component of the US industrial base that has been our fallback when threatened by foreign enemies is destroyed leaving us at the mercy of enemies who have a very different idea of how the world works than us.
2)The absence of a domestic automotive industry will mean that efforts by the government to reduce our dependence on foreign energy sources will be in the hands of foreign nations.
3) The Japanese transplants have a policy of matching UAW wage rates negotiated with the Big 3. That wage is ~$28 hour. Toyota was caught saying that wages would be cut from the current rate matching UAW wage rates to around $12-14/ hour once GM was pushed beneath the water. Honda doesn't even match pay now. It pays $12-$14 hour in Ohio and Indiana.
4) Unemployment is already floating around 9% in Kokomo and Elkhart in Indiana, Detroit in Michigan, and Flint. Flint's been fucked for a while. If GM falls, so do Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio. The economies of these states are intimately tied to the auto industry, and a GM collapse would mean that unemployment would most likely climb into the double digits. I honestly think that the unemployment brought by a GM collapse in these states would be, far, far worse than the Depression. The ripples would be dramatic. UAW wages keep towns afloat. If those disappear, then the jobs that they support do as well.
And before you start praising the Japanese carmakers, read this article. Toyota has greenwashed its labor record. And even in environmental terms, the company has used the decline of GM to expand its presence in SUVs and trucks. Toyota is no facing the same problems with an aging workforce that have caused GM such problems.
I suspect this may not compare totally or rhymes as NDD says because of contagion (global unfettered capital moving about), technology and deriviatives. As far as I know there was no such thing (?) as structured investment vehicles, or CDSs, CDOs and how they are all linked up together...
Since all of this is fictional money I don't see why they don't just freeze this entire market. It's supposedly (unknown) but $65 trillion and I have no idea how they could unravel it all easily....
I've recently seen articles comparing this to the Panic of 1907 and the Panic of 1873. The reasoning is that this is a bankers panic first and foremost.
I only know the basics of these two panics, so I don't know how applicable these comparisons really are.
Maybe you or Midtowng can pick up that particular Calvin ball and run with it in a blog post. I've written fairly extensively on them and noted that the Fed is working on setting up an auction clearing house for them but it's a ways away....but that's my understanding currently on why this is all so different is derivatives are kind of creating tsunami waves of defaults.
Side note: I've seen reports now where they try to blame the mathematicians and so on who created these "models" on derivatives. I just really doubt that it's just their fault...on faulty models...right. Somewhere, somehow, someone decided it was a good idea to leverage 40:1, 50:1, 70:1 and I just don't think it was some PhD geek sitting in a cube somewhere.
Like Midtowng, I think tomorrow (because of the Lehman CDS) will be quite interesting.
I want to do a better job on this, and I want to revisit it once we get next week's CPI, which will be more important than usual. This waterfall decline, day after day, didn't happen in 1987 and I don't recall it happening in 2001-2. It did happen, but not nearly as badly, in 1998. it also happened (unfortunately) in 1929.
I'm still not saying this is GD 2. History doesn't repeat, just rhymes. But this sure smacks of massive forced liquidation.
This is something that truly bothers me when you see such despair going on that people just give up and I imagine you're right but more I expect senior citizens who are already broke, using their home equity to pay bills and for medicine and were leaving their retirement in more risky areas because ....they were broke...
those are the ones I worry about...they already got the life savings of the younger ones in the 2000 crash.
Even worse people are just "egging on" fear. I watched a Glenn Beck segment where people were saying "horde food" and "buy guns" and if that isn't the dumbest thing on the air, I just don't know.
Then, there is a "hyperinflation" fear going on now as well.
Even worse, you know what they are blaming GM on? "legacy labor costs"....they continually try to attribute all problems to "labor" being "too expensive" instead of the US middle class being broke. On top of it, GM has done so many stupid moves for so long....although I'm not an expert on their actual debt or if they have CDses, SIVs and what not.
but to me, one of the most frightening things...is we have two candidates who are simply not offering up a new New Deal which assuredly we are going to need, a Keynesian based policy structure to not enter into Hooverville land...
and instead honestly it sure appears we have two Hooverville's on policy and now they are blaming each other..absolutely absurd! We have Obama blasting McCain's HOLC...which is Hillary's HOLC and many economists are recommending some sort of hybrid of a RTC/RFC and HOLC.
Today's near-crash had a different feel to it. I was expecting some sort of dead-cat bounce today. Instead we had a waterfall drop.
With the Lehman CDS settlement tomorrow, and what is likely to be tens of billions in losses, it could get very ugly. And the derivative market is where all this selling pressure is coming from. Would you want to be long over the weekend after 7 straight days of drops?
Gawd only knows what sort of strange brew the politicians and central bankers will stir up in the next couple days.
We've got banks failing all over the world. At least four nations have simply shut down their stock markets for most of the week.
I don't know how we'll get out of the month without a full-scale crash. Unless something unexpected happens soon, we'll be seeing the bankers jumping out of windows on Wall Street.
It used to be "what was good for GM was good for the country"
Now its what is bad for GM is what's bad for the country
A GM implosion would have a far more devasting effect on mainstreet than Wall Street bank failures - at least here in the great lakes region, so many jobs in the service supply and support industries depend on the domestic auto industry
If you want to completely finish off the middle class in this country - take out GM, and the rest will fall too.
The "smart" money is on Ford to pull thru - their international ops remain strong, and they are busily retooling domestically
GM laughed at Demming. Japan made him a national hero. Why? Because GM business model depends upon planned obsolescence, i.e. poor quality. The USA is better off without GM. A culture of deceit is unAmerican.
According to a guy in this thread on Technocrat, such decisions by banks and other property owners in the current-lack-of-credit situation are actually *MORE* rational than the alternatives.
Myself, I think I agree with you. If you're deep in debt, throwing out good commodities or rents in return for nothing is stupid.
at least people are reading, trying to engage. I saw that math error and this is so common, folks just do not have a sense of numbers, of proportion....and so you get these sorts of comments.
If we can get people to start being able to read numbers, graphs...that will only help to make smart policy Populist.
But, this is the people's blog so correcting these sorts of things is part of this.
I think I understand the conservative hands off, smaller government, get out of my face and lower my taxes. The US has done so much that plain isn't smart. I don't think we need smaller government but I think both sides can agree we need smarter government.
I just heard that Amtrak is being subsdized at a major loss and because of the politics, they keep getting the subsidies even when it makes no sense. They have long distance train tickets that are 2x, 3x the price of airfare, they don't allow pets on trains and so on and it takes forever. So obviously that form a travel is just not going to be used. That just is not wise, not responding to real market conditions.
How do we get smart government when it comes to these sorts of economic subsidies in the national interest? Out of the hands of our lobbyist ridden Congress and to an agency but then an administration can plunder an agency as the Bush administration has done.
All blog posts should be majority original material. Do not in essence repost articles and put a few comments around someone else's writing. If you want to do that, use the forums. They go to the Instapopulist as well as the main RSS feed but please do not post these as blogs for blogs are on the front page.
Please only quote small sections of other's writings to comply with copyrights on material.
Format your posts! Raw links not only look bad, they do not format correctly in RSS feeds. Do NOT post unformatted raw links (URLs)!
Quality blog posts are one of the reasons more people are coming to the site.
Please review the user guide for details on how to format your post.
Finally check your spelling and grammar! I am seeing major spelling and grammar mistakes in posts. Folks you are citizen journalists and this site allows you to have a front page voice. Please write quality posts in response.
This site has a rating system, by users and I will start to enforce removing such blogs off the front page through the rating system if we continue to get these kind of blog posts. It reduces the quality of the site and if you want to be heard....you must write quality, in depth, correct spelling, grammar and correctly formatted writings.
Firefox has a spelling checker build in and IE7 has an add on to check your spelling. The WYSIWYG editor also has a spell checker for IE7.
Then will government please repeal the stealth H-1B increase instituted (illegally?) by a DHS emergency ruling earlier this year?
New college grads, unemployed tech workers, and tech workers in danger of losing their job are hurt by that decision.
http://blogs.wsj.com/biztech/2008/04/07/government-quietly-changes-rules...
"What’s striking about the new rule is how it came about. Instead of releasing a draft and soliciting comments from the public – the typical process for governmental rule changes – DHS cited a clause in the Administrative Procedures Act, which is reserved for emergencies, to make the rule effective immediately."
Something you never hear the free marketeers talk about is the success of Conrail
In the mid 70's congress took over the assets of several bankrupt railroads to form Conrail. it was rough going at first, but over time it became profitable and well run organization, that was later able to be sold at a profit to the taxpayers to Norfolk Southern and CSX. CSX on the other hand, was run by John Snow, former Bush treasury secretary, and during his tenure had one of the worst maintenance and safety records of all the major railroads.
What would make sense to me would be a conrail style takeover of GM, turn it around then eventually sell off to a worthy buyer - such as Canadian auto parts giant Magna for example that unfortunately lost out to Cerberus in the Chrysler buyout bid
This can be done and works when you buy hard assets, such as railroad property and equipment - items with value, or in the case of auto - physical plant, captial equipment, inventories and intellectual property. Why it doesn't work well with finacial institutions is that the "assets" are largely paper, that can become completely worthless in the blink of an eye.
Toyota has not been immune from the slowdown - they had their worst sales quarter in a decade. they are now offering incentives - almost unheard of for japanese brands
They too are doing the very US branded thing and making big gas guzzling SUVs and trucks as well
and their flagship Corrolla is bigger and heavier and worse gas mileage than it used to be.
Quality rating agencies have also noted declines in the quality of Toyota and other import brands
they have already scaled back their aggressive US plant building plans and are even rumored to be considering closing some of their older facilities like Princeton IN
in garbage platitudes. Feeding this troll any facts will only make his/her head explode.
Stocks are on track for their worst year since 1937...
it's going like this:
Worse drop since:
20042002200120001998199119871977192919071937Unless they want to look at the days when the tulip bulb trade collapsed....it looks like we're heading for a record.
While it's all very well and fine to say that the US is better off without GM, I think that statements of this sort are most often based in ignorance, not fact.
Consider.
1) If there is not GM, a vital component of the US industrial base that has been our fallback when threatened by foreign enemies is destroyed leaving us at the mercy of enemies who have a very different idea of how the world works than us.
2)The absence of a domestic automotive industry will mean that efforts by the government to reduce our dependence on foreign energy sources will be in the hands of foreign nations.
3) The Japanese transplants have a policy of matching UAW wage rates negotiated with the Big 3. That wage is ~$28 hour. Toyota was caught saying that wages would be cut from the current rate matching UAW wage rates to around $12-14/ hour once GM was pushed beneath the water. Honda doesn't even match pay now. It pays $12-$14 hour in Ohio and Indiana.
4) Unemployment is already floating around 9% in Kokomo and Elkhart in Indiana, Detroit in Michigan, and Flint. Flint's been fucked for a while. If GM falls, so do Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio. The economies of these states are intimately tied to the auto industry, and a GM collapse would mean that unemployment would most likely climb into the double digits. I honestly think that the unemployment brought by a GM collapse in these states would be, far, far worse than the Depression. The ripples would be dramatic. UAW wages keep towns afloat. If those disappear, then the jobs that they support do as well.
And before you start praising the Japanese carmakers, read this article. Toyota has greenwashed its labor record. And even in environmental terms, the company has used the decline of GM to expand its presence in SUVs and trucks. Toyota is no facing the same problems with an aging workforce that have caused GM such problems.
I suspect this may not compare totally or rhymes as NDD says because of contagion (global unfettered capital moving about), technology and deriviatives. As far as I know there was no such thing (?) as structured investment vehicles, or CDSs, CDOs and how they are all linked up together...
Since all of this is fictional money I don't see why they don't just freeze this entire market. It's supposedly (unknown) but $65 trillion and I have no idea how they could unravel it all easily....
I've recently seen articles comparing this to the Panic of 1907 and the Panic of 1873. The reasoning is that this is a bankers panic first and foremost.
I only know the basics of these two panics, so I don't know how applicable these comparisons really are.
Maybe you or Midtowng can pick up that particular Calvin ball and run with it in a blog post. I've written fairly extensively on them and noted that the Fed is working on setting up an auction clearing house for them but it's a ways away....but that's my understanding currently on why this is all so different is derivatives are kind of creating tsunami waves of defaults.
Side note: I've seen reports now where they try to blame the mathematicians and so on who created these "models" on derivatives. I just really doubt that it's just their fault...on faulty models...right. Somewhere, somehow, someone decided it was a good idea to leverage 40:1, 50:1, 70:1 and I just don't think it was some PhD geek sitting in a cube somewhere.
New "emergency" fixes every single day.
Like Midtowng, I think tomorrow (because of the Lehman CDS) will be quite interesting.
I want to do a better job on this, and I want to revisit it once we get next week's CPI, which will be more important than usual. This waterfall decline, day after day, didn't happen in 1987 and I don't recall it happening in 2001-2. It did happen, but not nearly as badly, in 1998. it also happened (unfortunately) in 1929.
I'm still not saying this is GD 2. History doesn't repeat, just rhymes. But this sure smacks of massive forced liquidation.
who already jumped starting in 2000.
This is something that truly bothers me when you see such despair going on that people just give up and I imagine you're right but more I expect senior citizens who are already broke, using their home equity to pay bills and for medicine and were leaving their retirement in more risky areas because ....they were broke...
those are the ones I worry about...they already got the life savings of the younger ones in the 2000 crash.
Even worse people are just "egging on" fear. I watched a Glenn Beck segment where people were saying "horde food" and "buy guns" and if that isn't the dumbest thing on the air, I just don't know.
Then, there is a "hyperinflation" fear going on now as well.
Even worse, you know what they are blaming GM on? "legacy labor costs"....they continually try to attribute all problems to "labor" being "too expensive" instead of the US middle class being broke. On top of it, GM has done so many stupid moves for so long....although I'm not an expert on their actual debt or if they have CDses, SIVs and what not.
but to me, one of the most frightening things...is we have two candidates who are simply not offering up a new New Deal which assuredly we are going to need, a Keynesian based policy structure to not enter into Hooverville land...
and instead honestly it sure appears we have two Hooverville's on policy and now they are blaming each other..absolutely absurd! We have Obama blasting McCain's HOLC...which is Hillary's HOLC and many economists are recommending some sort of hybrid of a RTC/RFC and HOLC.
God.
Today's near-crash had a different feel to it. I was expecting some sort of dead-cat bounce today. Instead we had a waterfall drop.
With the Lehman CDS settlement tomorrow, and what is likely to be tens of billions in losses, it could get very ugly. And the derivative market is where all this selling pressure is coming from. Would you want to be long over the weekend after 7 straight days of drops?
Gawd only knows what sort of strange brew the politicians and central bankers will stir up in the next couple days.
We've got banks failing all over the world. At least four nations have simply shut down their stock markets for most of the week.
I don't know how we'll get out of the month without a full-scale crash. Unless something unexpected happens soon, we'll be seeing the bankers jumping out of windows on Wall Street.
It used to be "what was good for GM was good for the country"
Now its what is bad for GM is what's bad for the country
A GM implosion would have a far more devasting effect on mainstreet than Wall Street bank failures - at least here in the great lakes region, so many jobs in the service supply and support industries depend on the domestic auto industry
If you want to completely finish off the middle class in this country - take out GM, and the rest will fall too.
The "smart" money is on Ford to pull thru - their international ops remain strong, and they are busily retooling domestically
GM laughed at Demming. Japan made him a national hero. Why? Because GM business model depends upon planned obsolescence, i.e. poor quality. The USA is better off without GM. A culture of deceit is unAmerican.
According to a guy in this thread on Technocrat, such decisions by banks and other property owners in the current-lack-of-credit situation are actually *MORE* rational than the alternatives.
Myself, I think I agree with you. If you're deep in debt, throwing out good commodities or rents in return for nothing is stupid.
at least people are reading, trying to engage. I saw that math error and this is so common, folks just do not have a sense of numbers, of proportion....and so you get these sorts of comments.
If we can get people to start being able to read numbers, graphs...that will only help to make smart policy Populist.
But, this is the people's blog so correcting these sorts of things is part of this.
You're right- she's off by AT LEAST a factor of 1000.
Pages