Almost lost among the momentous events of the GM denouement are the international trade implications. GM, of course, is a multinational company. In 2008, according to GM's annual 10-K report, GM made almost half of its $148 billion in revenue outside of the United States.Err, make that they made lots of money on cars they used to build outside the US.
GM had recently informed Congress that it planned to produce roughly 50,000 subcompacts per year in China to sell in the U.S market in the near future. However, on Thursday, UAW President Ron Gettelfinger said that GM had agreed not to import the cars from China and to produce them in the United States instead as part of its deal with the UAW.Because they're now bankrolled by anyone holding a dollar in their hands*, there's no reason to make decisions based on profits. Instead, they will make decisions based on political forces. After the unions and the state consume and digest GM and Chrysler, they'll begin to eye Ford hungrily. When they see Ford do things not in the interests of the unions, laws will be passed, marketing budgets increased, and all manner of tricks will be played to crush Ford and bring them under the control of the state.
So how did we get from there to here? Here, according to media accounts this week, is an imminent transformation of General Motors into a government-owned company, infused with upward of $50 billion in federal money. The United States will accept stock in lieu of the cash the company owes, and Washington -- that is, you, the taxpayer -- will become the owner of 70 percent of the new GM.You the taxpayer may be the owner, but you'll have no more say in it than the residents of Buenos Aires did when the Argentine government took over various businesses. All will be handled within the palace of el presidente.
When might the company stand on its own, to paraphrase Mr. Obama? When would the government exit the stage?Never and never. If they wanted to spin the thing off, they'd get it making a profit as soon as possible. That would mean big cars and low wages for the union. That's the exact opposite of what they're doing.
But is a massive, unbounded federal commitment to a company that evidently still can attract no private capital really the only option? It doesn't take much imagination to forecast the political pressures that will buffet the government-as-auto-executive.They're not concerned about these political pressures, they're counting on them. With much of the industrial midwest in thrall to the government after this takeover, they can hand out goodies to their supporters.
When the Bush administration first assessed its unpalatable options, Congress played an active and constructive role. Where are the legislators now?They're licking their chops, baby. If you thought Michelle Obama's gig where she doubled her pay after her husband was elected to the Senate was sweet, just imagine the vast patronage that will be possible now. Family members eight levels removed will be able to get cushy jobs in auto parts manufacturers three layers removed from the government-controlled company. Just try tracking those down and accusing people of corruption.
later.
The Government is handing out 400,000 tonnes of free spuds in rural towns. It says that it is merely distributing the surplus from a bumper crop, but Mr Ahmadinejad’s opponents accuse it of bribing the poor. “Death to potatoes,” they chant at rallies.What's with these people? How does everything have to end up in a chant of "Death to ______!" What kind of conversations do they have?
Iranian 1: Man, today was a bad day on the road. It took me 30 minutes to get home.Death to potatoes. Maybe they're doing this to make themselves too difficult to parody. Ya think?
Iranian 2: I know what you mean. Death to traffic! Did I tell you about how my insurance company accidentally billed me for my doctor's visit?
Iranian 1: No, really? Death to insurance!
Iranian 2: I hear you. Well, I gotta run. Going bowling tonight.
Together: Death to the pins!
Taxpayers are on the hook for an extra $55,000 a household to cover rising federal commitments made just in the past year for retirement benefits, the national debt and other government promises, a USA TODAY analysis shows.We are the ones we've been waiting for to pay the debt because the rest of the world has had enough.
The 12% rise in red ink in 2008 stems from an explosion of federal borrowing during the recession, plus an aging population driving up the costs of Medicare and Social Security.
That's the biggest leap in the long-term burden on taxpayers since a Medicare prescription drug benefit was added in 2003.
The latest increase raises federal obligations to a record $546,668 per household in 2008, according to the USA TODAY analysis. That's quadruple what the average U.S. household owes for all mortgages, car loans, credit cards and other debt combined.
For the first time since another Democrat occupied the White House, investors from Beijing to Zurich are challenging a president’s attempts to revive the economy with record deficit spending. Fifteen years after forcing Bill Clinton to abandon his own stimulus plans, the so-called bond vigilantes are punishing Barack Obama for quadrupling the budget shortfall to $1.85 trillion. By driving up yields on U.S. debt, they are also threatening to derail Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke’s efforts to cut borrowing costs for businesses and consumers.Dave Ramsey, please call your office!
Take a look at abortion. The Catholic Church calls it murder, yet our feminist calls it ‘oppression of women.’ There have been 44,000,000 abortions in the US since Roe in 1973. Around 22,000,000 of these have been females. And nothing so oppresses a female as murdering her. The Church has been one of a few voices—the others being Islam, conservative Protestant Christianity and Orthodox Judaism— defending the rights of all those unborn girls. All those 22,000,000 slaughtered females, never to grow up to be oppressed by the Church—or for that matter, to be indoctrinated into the joys of radical feminism.Lucky for them, those dead girls won't ever have to suffer through the male hegemony of a world where the Catholic Church is allowed to exist.
Chris Ripke is a well-known artist in the city. His studio is near a mosque in Insuindestraat. Shocked in 2004 by the murder of director Theo Van Gogh by an Dutch Islamist, Chris decided to paint an angel on wall of his studio and the biblical commandment "Gij zult niet doden," thou shalt not kill. His neighbors at the mosque found the words "offensive," and called the mayor of Rotterdam at the time, the liberal Ivo Opstelten. The mayor ordered the police to erase the painting, because it was "racist." Wim Nottroth, a television journalist, camped out on the spot in protest. The police arrested him, and his film was destroyed. Ephimenco did the same in his own window: "I put up a big white sheet with the biblical commandment. Photographers came, and the radio. If you can no longer write 'do not kill' in this country, then you are saying that we are all in prison. It is like apartheid, whites living with whites and blacks with blacks. There is a great chill. Islamism wants to change the structure of the country." For Ephimenco, part of the problem is the de-Christianization of society. "When I arrived here, during the 1960's, religion was dying, a unique event in Europe, a collective de-Christianization. Then the Muslims brought religion back to the center of social life. Aided by the anti-Christian elite."Civilization arises from married families. They pay the taxes, raise the productive members of the next generation and provide stability for society. Whatever its warts, Islam has married families. The secular Dutch have this:
President Obama's energy adviser has suggested all the world's roofs should be painted white as part of efforts to slow global warming.Why stop there? Let's eliminate everything dark! Dark animals, dark leaves, dark dirt, it's all got to go!
Professor Steven Chu, the US Energy Secretary, said the unusual proposal would mean homes in hot countries would save energy and money on air conditioning by deflecting the sun's rays.
More pale surfaces could also slow global warming by reflecting heat into space rather than allowing it to be absorbed by dark surfaces where it is trapped by greenhouse gases and increases temperatures.
GM, propped up by $19.4 billion in emergency U.S. loans, will file for bankruptcy protection after failing to get 90 percent of bondholders to swap their debt, Chief Executive Officer Fritz Henderson has said. The exchange offer was opposed by both institutional and individual investors, who said they’ve been treated worse than a union retiree-medical fund.Corrections mine. The People have spoken, Gary. You need to pay your Fair Share.
“The offer probably cost them more to print out than the offer is worth,” Gary Thomas, aretired auto mechanicvicious, greedy tycoon and GM bondholder, said in a telephone interview from Kingston, Tennessee, before the results were announced.
"There are a number of creditors that are not happy with the preferential treatment afforded to the United Auto Workers at the seeming expense of creditors," said John Lonski, chief economist for Moody's Investors Service ...It's getting harder and harder to find investors for these kinds of firms.
The GM and Chrysler bankruptcies may be unique situations in a long-politicized industry, but they also could mark "a new period of uncertainty for the debt recoveries of favored-political-class companies," Garman said in his report.
As GM teeters toward a bankruptcy filing and Chrysler attempts to restructure in bankruptcy court, the Obama administration is offering most of the recovery value of those companies to "a favored political class, in this case the United Auto Workers, leaving creditors with very slender debt recoveries," Christopher Garman, founder of Garman Research in Orinda, California, said in a report released late on Friday ...Wait a minute! That's not working out well at all. It's clear that Amerikkka (thanks, Rev. Wright!) is filled with reactionary forces that are struggling to prevent the president from ushering in a glorious, new paradise.
To gauge whether those cases have made debtholders wary of other companies with so-called favored political classes, Garman compared spreads, or bonds' extra yields over U.S. Treasury yields, for companies with collective bargaining agreements with the high-yield bond market as a whole.
While the two performed in line with each other since 2003, they diverged sharply in February, with spreads on companies with organized labor gapping nearly 11 percentage points higher than the market as a whole, according to Garman's research.
The US Treasury is facing an ordeal by fire this week as it tries to sell $100bn (£62bn) of bonds to a deeply sceptical market amid growing fears of a sovereign bond crisis in the Anglo-Saxon world ...Sounds like we'll need another Stimuloid Porkgasm™ to deal with this!
The US is not alone in facing a deficit crisis. Governments worldwide have to raise some $6 trillion in debt this year, with huge demands in Japan and Europe. Kyle Bass from the US fund Hayman Advisors said the markets were choking on debt.
"There isn't enough capital in the world to buy the new sovereign issuance required to finance the giant fiscal deficits that countries are so intent on running. There is simply not enough money out there," he said. "If the US loses control of long rates, they will not be able to arrest asset price declines. If they print too much money, they will debase the dollar and cause stagflation.
China has warned a top member of the US Federal Reserve that it is increasingly disturbed by the Fed's direct purchase of US Treasury bonds.At least Rick's got his finger on the real problem.
Richard Fisher, president of the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank, said: "Senior officials of the Chinese government grilled me about whether or not we are going to monetise the actions of our legislature."
"I must have been asked about that a hundred times in China. I was asked at every single meeting about our purchases of Treasuries. That seemed to be the principal preoccupation of those that were invested with their surpluses mostly in the United States," he told the Wall Street Journal.
"This situation is of your own creation. When you berate your representatives or senators or presidents for the mess we are in, you are really berating yourself. You elect them," he said.Us.
Read the whole thing.
- Happiness has very little to do with income or social position.
- Happiness has everything to do with relationships.
- Just because someone is behaving a particular way at one point in their life doesn't mean they'll continue to act that way throughout the remaining years--either for good or bad.
- Perhaps the greatest inhibitor of happiness is ease and lethargy.
- Don't count someone out, we all mature and progress at different speeds.
