So much for all of the talk about China leading the world out of the doldrums. The news out of the country is that exports — think the pillar of their economy — aren’t growing. Let me rephrase that. They’re shrinking. From the WSJ: Chinese exports in April fell 22.6% from a year earlier, and […]
Archive for May 11th, 2009
GMAC Set To Join The Government’s Portfolio
I didn’t think I would be writing this post so soon after the last one I wrote about Ford and the one I wrote last night about GMAC but here we are. The WSJ has a pretty satirical article about the likelihood of the government taking over GMAC. GMAC differs from other companies under the […]
Ford’s Temporary Miracle
Right now Ford is sort of the JPMorgan Chase of the car industry, or at least the remnants of the American headquartered car industry. Alan Mullaly, the Boeing veteran that came into restructure the company, is garnering the same sort of praise as Jamie Dimon. Both are viewed as adults who avoided the excesses of […]
Does Closing Dealerships Hurt Sales?
The WSJ reported today that Chrysler and GM are close to identifying which of their dealers are going to be axed and should let the winners and losers know their status in the next few days. That’s hardly earth shaking news but it did raise a question in my mind. Would the fact that a […]
Will Deleveraging Kill The Recovery?
However you want to describe it — green shoots, changes in the second derivative, inflection points — talk of a brighter future is all the rage, even in the most pessimistic of hearts. That may be the case but where might all of this take us. Here is some dot connecting from a couple different […]
Who’s Watching The Fed?
Rick Santelli was ranting about the Fed today and offered up this snippet of testimony furnished to Congress by the inspector general responsible for policing them. It’s a pretty pathetic performance. Draw your own conclusions.
Obama Changing The Antitrust Rules
Beware of government lawyers with a small case load. Invariably they will change the rules of the game in order to generate work. Such appears to be the case with the antitrust division of the U.S. Justice Department. The head of that division, Christine Varney, announced that they would ditch the Bush approach to antitrust […]