Does Anyone feel like Bailing

[tw]

Another example of America selling off parts to pay for Enron accounting, war without purpose, and LTCM style hedge fund investing. From the NY Times of 11 Feb 2009:

Advanced Micro Devices, Intel’s main competitor, has found the cost of building chip factories so prohibitive that it is trying to turn over that part of its operation to a newly created company to stay focused on design. On Tuesday, A.M.D. said it would need to delay a shareholder vote on the creation of the company, jointly owned by A.M.D. and an investment firm based in Abu Dhabi, until next week.

[TheMercenary]

Detroit Automakers Face Extinction

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...ft=1&f=2100359

[classicman]

Why Obama’s new Tarp will fail to rescue the banks

bama’s presidency already failed? In normal times, this would be a ludicrous question. But these are not normal times. They are times of great danger. Today, the new US administration can disown responsibility for its inheritance; tomorrow, it will own it. Today, it can offer solutions; tomorrow it will have become the problem. Today, it is in control of events; tomorrow, events will take control of it. Doing too little is now far riskier than doing too much. If he fails to act decisively, the president risks being overwhelmed, like his predecessor. The costs to the US and the world of another failed presidency do not bear contemplating.

What is needed? The answer is: focus and ferocity. If Mr Obama does not fix this crisis, all he hopes from his presidency will be lost. If he does, he can reshape the agenda. Hoping for the best is foolish. He should expect the worst and act accordingly.

Yet hoping for the best is what one sees in the stimulus programme and – so far as I can judge from Tuesday’s sketchy announcement by Tim Geithner, Treasury secretary – also in the new plans for fixing the banking system. I commented on the former last week. I would merely add that it is extraordinary that a popular new president, confronting a once-in-80-years’ economic crisis, has let Congress shape the outcome.

The banking programme seems to be yet another child of the failed interventions of the past one and a half years: optimistic and indecisive. If this “progeny of the troubled asset relief programme” fails, Mr Obama’s credibility will be ruined. Now is the time for action that seems close to certain to resolve the problem; this, however, does not seem to be it.

A dark read.

[tw]

Originally Posted by TheMercenary

Detroit Automakers Face Extinction

That is next week's story. Already Chrysler has sold off part of itself to Fiat and others. GM should be doing same. It will not. Instead it will make veiled appeals for more government welfare. It will want more money to buy back parts of Delphi.

Ford is a completely different story. A benchmark has long been the 70 horsepower per liter engine. After violent arguments between William Clay Ford and Jacques Nasser, Nasser was removed and Ford Motor finally started to fix itself. How long ago? Maybe seven years ago? So Ford has just started their recovery. Innovation, quality, and design take that long. That was when Ford finally developed 70 Hp/liter engines - a technology that was world standard in 1992 and why no car needs a V-8 engine.

Chrysler has nothing in the innovation pipeline. GM has a 400 horsepower Camaro and a hybrid - the Volt. So they will both go crying to government about how '_hard_' they are working. Maybe they will do it without the George Jr whine. But next week is when this story gets told. Congress probably will have no choice but the agree with Detroit and offer more corporate welfare when both companies should be replacing their top executives.

[xoxoxoBruce]

I think the Chrysler-Fiat deal has fallen through.

[TheMercenary]

Say it isn't so. The Italians wised up?

[xoxoxoBruce]

Nope, they're still dumb, and broke from what I read.
Financing isn't exactly abundant at the moment.

[TheMercenary]

Hell, just have them get a loan from Guido at the Mafia bank.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Or the Vatican Bank.

[Trilby]

Or Tony Soprano...oh. Wait. He might be dead...

[TheMercenary]

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

Or the Vatican Bank.

Ahhhh... the Pope, not a bad idea. Maybe they could cash in the gold fillings from the Jews.

[classicman]

This is a very interesting article.

Chomsky: Understanding the Crisis — Markets, the State and Hypocrisy

This is pretty elementary economics. They happen to discuss it in this book; others have discussed it too. And that's what's happening. Risks were under-priced, therefore more risks were taken than should have been, and sooner or later it was going to crash. Nobody predicted exactly when, and the depth of the crash is a little surprising. That's in part because of the creation of exotic financial instruments which were deregulated, meaning that nobody really knew who owed what to whom. It was all split up in crazy ways. So the depth of the crisis is pretty severe — we're not to the bottom yet — and the architects of this are the people who are now designing Obama's economic policies.

Dean Baker, one of the few economists who saw what was coming all along, pointed out that it's almost like appointing Osama bin Laden to run the so-called war on terror. Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers, Clinton's treasury secretaries, are among the main architects of the crisis. Summers intervened strongly to prevent any regulation of derivatives and other exotic instruments. Rubin, who preceded him, was right in the lead of undermining the Glass-Steagall act, all of which is pretty ironic. The Glass-Steagall Act protected commercial banks from risky investment firms, insurance firms, and so on, which kind of protected the core of the economy. That was broken up in 1999 largely under Rubin's influence. He immediately left the treasury department and became a director of Citigroup, which benefited from the breakdown of Glass-Steagall by expanding and becoming a "financial supermarket" as they called it. Just to increase the irony (or the tragedy if you like) Citigroup is now getting huge taxpayer subsidies to try to keep it together and just in the last few weeks announced that it's breaking up. It's going back to trying to protect its commercial banking from risky side investments. Rubin resigned in disgrace — he's largely responsible for this. But he's one of Obama's major economic advisors, Summers is another one; Summer's protégé Tim Geithner is the Treasury Secretary.

None of this is really unanticipated. There were very good economists like say David Felix, an international economist who's been writing about this for years. And the reasons are known: markets are inefficient; they under-price social costs. And financial institutions underprice systemic risk. So say you're a CEO of Goldman Sachs. If you're doing your job correctly, when you make a loan you ensure that the risk to you is low. So if it collapses, you'll be able to handle it. You do care about the risk to yourself, you price that in. But you don't price in systemic risk, the risk that the whole financial system will erode. That's not part of your calculation.

Well that's intrinsic to markets — they're inefficient. Robin Hahnel had a couple of very good articles about this recently in economics journals. But this is first year economics course stuff — markets are inefficient; these are some of their inefficiencies; there are many others. They can be controlled by some degree of regulation, but that was dismantled under religious fanaticism about efficient markets, which lacked empirical support and theoretical basis; it was just based on religious fanaticism. So now it's collapsing.

People talk about a return to Keynesianism, but that's because of a systematic refusal to pay attention to the way the economy works. There's a lot of wailing now about "socializing" the economy by bailing out financial institutions. Yeah, in a way we are, but that's icing on the cake. The whole economy's been socialized since — well actually forever, but certainly since the Second World War. This mythology that the economy is based on entrepreneurial initiative and consumer choice, well ok, to an extent it is. For example at the marketing end, you can choose one electronic device and not another. But the core of the economy relies very heavily on the state sector, and transparently so. So for example to take the last economic boom which was based on information technology — where did that come from? Computers and the Internet. Computers and the Internet were almost entirely within the state system for about 30 years — research, development, procurement, other devices — before they were finally handed over to private enterprise for profit-making. It wasn't an instantaneous switch, but that's roughly the picture. And that's the picture pretty much for the core of the economy.

So Rubin gets the law changed and then went into the sector to benefit from it. . . nice.

[sugarpop]

Originally Posted by classicman

Absolutely Bruce, I agree 100%, but finding the bridges, for example, that need the least amount of work and can be repaired in the least amount of time is not a good plan. There are so many that need to be completely replaced and those won't be getting any of this money. Not to mention the infrastructure like the sewers and and water systems in many major cities which would disrupt too much for too long to be properly repaired or upgraded.

So we should just let them continue to rot, so we don't inconvenience people? My god, the cost of repairs when things break every year just keeps adding up. We should just systematically start to fix/replace things, starting with the things that are in the worst shape. Remember the bridge that collapsed a couple of years ago? Or the water main busting in DC a few of months ago? Apparently, they had already fixed over 300 pipes in DC that had burst before that happened, this winter alone. In Savannah, where I live, underground pipes have blown up twice this year.

About Japan, from what I've heard from numerous economists, including Paul Krugman, the whole reason why Japan was in a recession for so long is because they didn't put enough money into it initially, so they had to keep pumping more in. That is why we need to go big, from the beginning. Doing things piecemeal, and stopping too soon, is what causes big recessions to last longer.

For crying out loud, even the Chamber of Commerce is behind the stimulus, and they are hardly a liberal organization.

[sugarpop]

Originally Posted by classicman

Why Obama’s new Tarp will fail to rescue the banks


A dark read.

I don't really think we should be bailing out the banks. They caused this mess. I DO, however, believe we should be using government money to create jobs for people by rebuilding our infrastructure, pumping money into alternative enregy (which I believe will create a whole new industry and supply millions of jobs while reduce our dependence on oil), and updating our schools and medical records.

On Fareed Zakaria's show this past weekend, he was at the World Economic Forum, and the finance minister of France said they only had to bail out one of their banks, and when they did, they got rid of all the management. Isn't that how it should be? Why would we leave people in charge who caused this to happen? People keep saying they are the smartest people in America, well, really? Because it doesn't seem very smart to me, what they were doing. It isn't rocket science, even though they want us to believe it is.

And some of the people Obama has advising him were a part of it, I believe, like Larry Summers?

[sugarpop]

Originally Posted by tw

That is next week's story. Already Chrysler has sold off part of itself to Fiat and others. GM should be doing same. It will not. Instead it will make veiled appeals for more government welfare. It will want more money to buy back parts of Delphi.

Ford is a completely different story. A benchmark has long been the 70 horsepower per liter engine. After violent arguments between William Clay Ford and Jacques Nasser, Nasser was removed and Ford Motor finally started to fix itself. How long ago? Maybe seven years ago? So Ford has just started their recovery. Innovation, quality, and design take that long. That was when Ford finally developed 70 Hp/liter engines - a technology that was world standard in 1992 and why no car needs a V-8 engine.

Chrysler has nothing in the innovation pipeline. GM has a 400 horsepower Camaro and a hybrid - the Volt. So they will both go crying to government about how '_hard_' they are working. Maybe they will do it without the George Jr whine. But next week is when this story gets told. Congress probably will have no choice but the agree with Detroit and offer more corporate welfare when both companies should be replacing their top executives.

GM made electric cars back in the 90s. They CHOSE to quit making them and focus on gas guzzling trucks and SUVs. Maybe those companies should be turned over to innovators making electric cars, or cars that run on compressed air or something. I don't even think we should be fosuing on hybrids, they still require gas. For sure the management should be gone.