Sponsored by CNN
Simon Monjack's Death Similar to Wife Brittany Murphy's view!
CNN.com - Coroner finds Brittany Murphy's husband's death caused by acute pneumonia and severe anemia.
94 Comments
- Chestnutridge, on 07/24/2010, -8/+32It now appears that the U.S governement will be able to get back most (if not all) of the money it spent on GM. It looks certain they will recoup their total investiment on Ally Financial (GMAC). Chysler doesn't look as good but their bankrupcy was much more complicated. The banks are repaying all of the TARP money with interest sooner than expected.
Now explain to me again why it would have been a better idea to allow the banking system to completely collapse and auto industry to completely disappear in this country? Do you really believe things would now be "better" if the government had just stood back and watched economic activity grind to a complete halt? That seems to be what the "tea party" type are saying but none of them explains how that would have helped. - Chestnutridge, on 07/24/2010, -2/+21Yeah . . . Japan, South Korea, Germany.
- yacks, on 07/24/2010, -3/+19and Ford retooled their business before the bad times struck.. it was by accident and they didn't foresee this happening, but they were able to trim a lot of fat and bad loans off the books by the time the ***** hit the fan. And they started making vehicles people wanted to buy.
- bacon_skoda, on 07/24/2010, -5/+20i'm sure none of the tea party folks know that the "bailout" was basically a loan.
with interest. and conditions. - Target91, on 07/24/2010, -1/+16Those suppliers are running very thin margins. If 2 of their biggest buyers collapsed they also would have collapsed. Sure other car companies such as Toyota, Honda, Fiat, etc will move in. But it won't happen overnight. Normally these companies could get a loan to sustain themselves until other companies move in, unfortunately this is going on in the middle of a massive credit freeze which is why GM and Chrysler needed government help in the first place. (Well, besides making ***** products.)
The end result being Ford goes into bankruptcy with GM and Chrysler and the future of the American auto industry becomes uncertain. Which I believe was Ford's reason for sending Alan Mullaly to DC with Rick Wagner and Bob Nardelli to beg for money. - AlucardtheGreat, on 07/23/2010, -12/+27Very interesting read. Too few people really think about complex interconnectedness. For instance, few people know that one of the chief reasons why the auto industry killed the electric car was because electric cars require far fewer part replacements, which would have meant a lot of lost revenue for the auto industry.
- NotAChickenHawk, on 07/24/2010, -0/+14Yes, but why do you assume it would have been Ford? Also, why do you assume that those cars would have been made in the US, or even using parts produced and supplied in the US?
- novenator, on 07/24/2010, -7/+20Do we want to preserve an industrial base in America, or are the cons entrenched in the establishment so rabid about corporate profits that they are willing to sacrifice this so that the country cannot compete with certain rising nations a generation from now?
Long term thinking here folks. Try to leave the nation in a better position for the next generation, and the one following that. Short term quarterly profits that only benefit the rich do nothing for this.
Preserving GM and Chrysler ultimately help preserve Ford as well. They are all in this together. - eliseville, on 07/23/2010, -3/+15I'm pretty sure they covered that as one of many 'proximate causes' in the movie "Who Killed the Electric Car". Lots of different groups for lots of different reasons wanted it to just go away. The movie was an actual investigation that ended by indicting everyone.
- Target91, on 07/24/2010, -2/+13"Ford would have doubled in size almost overnight."
Oh yes because the first thing a company that is struggling to survive will do in a recession is expand. People were not buying cars. Even Toyota and Honda were seeing their sales slow. Yes it would have removed competition but Ford was using all of their spare cash just to stay alive. They didn't have any spare money. - subatomicdoc, on 07/23/2010, -10/+20Well written and definitely worth considering when evaluating the outcome of the bailout.
- brad3378, on 07/24/2010, -1/+10Good Point Smeemily.
Why didn't we have a tea party during the Reagan era when his administration bailed out Chrysler while tripling the national debt over the course of his presidency? - smemily, on 07/24/2010, -1/+10Nor do they seem to remember that Chrysler was bailed out (same way, loan) in the early 1980s.
- NotAChickenHawk, on 07/24/2010, -1/+9Well, both sides are true - Ford was in much better shape than Chrysler and GM, so you are absolutely correct about Ford's unions and its management. And if GM and Chrysler could have somehow saved themselves, Ford too would have been fine. But had GM and Chysler both gone under, in a best case scenario it would have been very disruptive for Ford and they may not have survived it. Its not as if Ford was a pillar of strength - it was strong enough to weather the storm, but not by that much.
- uRmyHartBstopR, on 07/24/2010, -1/+9This is like "duh", for a car-guy like me.
It was a given that Ford was going to collapse if GM and Chrysler goes down. Even if Ford magically pull a miracle out of their asses, with GM and Chrysler unemployed workers, the auto manufacturer tiers that depends on those two, and the dealers going out of business, no one in their right mind would buy a $15k+ product with that domino effect and unemployment rate.
Heck they barely saved their bacon by selling Aston Martin, and the combo Land Rover and Jaguar to Tata. They're selling Volvo to Geely, Chinese, which is just shooting themselves in the foot. Come on man, China have at least a year or so behind us on safety technology (crash safety and such) and you had to sell Volvo to China. For years, I've bitched about Lincoln and Mercury, and now they finally decides to kill Mercury. - bacon_skoda, on 07/24/2010, -1/+8what do you call the internet then?
there is a reason we have a .com and UK has a .co.uk. - brad3378, on 07/24/2010, -1/+8These days, it's not even physically possible to double production overnight.
There's too many bottlenecks in the system - the greatest of which are the sheet metal stamping dies which can take months to create even after the designs are frozen and the drawings (or CNC toolpaths) are in your hand. When you pay multi millions for a set of stamping dies, you don't keep an extra set lying around. It would be just as foolish to buy a cow when all you want is a glass of milk. - brad3378, on 07/24/2010, -5/+11That's a ***** myth.
IT'S THE BATTERIES.
Find me a battery pack that gets me 200 miles to the charge costs under
$5000 and I'll build my own damn electric car. If you're a believer in conspiracies, then don't you find it suspicious that there's not a single kit on eBay to convert a car to electric power with 200 miles of range for that price?
There's a reason why the Tesla Roadster costs $100,000.00 and it's because
it literally has 6831 lithium ion cells!
source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Roadster
Do the math.
How much does just one cell phone battery cost?
Frankly, $100,000 for a Tesla is a bargain. - xdre, on 07/24/2010, -1/+7You know why Ford was in better shape?
They ran out of money a few years back when it was still possible to get multi-billion dollar loans from the banks. True story. - smacksaw, on 07/24/2010, -0/+5Eh...we have P3's here in Canada (Public-Private Partnerships) and some of them work out alright, others do not. And whether or not it's a friendly or adversarial system with the workers (read: unions), they often cripple industry as much as they facilitate it. The best example I can think of is in healthcare, where nurses go on strike and everyone's surgeries get canceled and pushed back weeks or months. Or like here in Quebec where the doctors are fighting like crazy to preserve their fee-based system and prevent any new NPs or doctors from lowering their workload and thus their profits.
No, whether it's government, corporations or unions, when big entities get together like that, they eventually start behaving like the mob. They're supposed to work with us and the businesses that hire them, but it's not all wine and roses. - orlandorays, on 07/24/2010, -2/+7I myself think the bailout DID save Ford.
It alienated a good number of the few GM and Chrysler customers left, pushing them toward Ford out of a desire to not reward what have essentially become zombie companies. Those customers have not yet returned to Chrysler. A few went back to GM, but GM has begun to act frivolously again even before they're ready to "leave government ownership". And they haven't even completely left their problems. They lied about paying off their bailout money (they used MORE bailout money to pay the first one off).
Ford will always have an advantage over GM and Chrysler because it didn't accept bailout money, but how long that remains as long as they are beholden to the unions is anybody's guess. - Chestnutridge, on 07/24/2010, -0/+5Ford has actually take about 6 billion dollars in loans from the government for re-tooling etc. Not technically bailout money but a big chunk of change.
- novenator, on 07/24/2010, -2/+7China. Of course, the cons have been outsourcing jobs there for the last generation to maximize corporate profit, so they wouldn't care.
- brad3378, on 07/24/2010, -1/+6If the 2 biggest competitors go under, they quit paying their suppliers.
If critical suppliers go bankrupt, Ford can't build cars.
If Ford can't build cars it goes bankrupt
If the Auto industry goes bankrupt, millions of people lose their jobs.
If Millions more lose their jobs, the unemployment insurance system goes bankrupt (and nearly did)
Bailout loans are paid back with interest.
Unemployment checks are not paid back at all.
Any more questions? - Samurai77, on 07/24/2010, -0/+5You forgot your /s.
- brad3378, on 07/24/2010, -1/+6Add something do the conversation why don't ya.
- brad3378, on 07/24/2010, -0/+5I don't believe that it is a safe assumption that all of the manufacturing resources used by bankrupt automotive companies would be used to create new automotive companies.
It's more likely these assets would be used to compete in more profitable industries such as the Military industrial complex. In the long run, who really wins when an industry switches from consumer based products to M.I.C. based products? - Chestnutridge, on 07/24/2010, -0/+5Actually they did. GM went into bankruptcy and a lot of their debt was eliminated first. They just had a lot of debt.
- MatzahMan, on 07/24/2010, -5/+10"Government CANNOT create wealth and prosperity."
You clearly don't know much about economics or history do you? - NoLiberties, 23 hr 53 min ago, -2/+7People look at the "bailouts" and TARP with a blind eye. The government did the right thing here, the cost of doing nothing compared to the cost of these programs would have been staggering!
- xdre, on 07/24/2010, -0/+5The barriers to entry in the automotive world are too high, plus you have to realize just how big these companies really are.
- Chestnutridge, on 07/24/2010, -1/+5The White House continues to use conservative numbers but financial analysts are more optomistic. They point out that this fall GM plans to do an IPO on 1/5 of the stock temporarily held by the U.S. government. The stock is expected to sale for 15-20 billion dollars. If it goes through, the U.S. will not longer own a majority of the shares of GM and (over time) they can sell off the remaining 4/5s of their stake. When it is all over and done, the U.S. may break even, GM will be a far stronger company and, oh yeah, the economy would be stronger. But I guess you think a complete collapse of the economy would have been a "epic" success?
- abduln, on 07/24/2010, -2/+6That is really disenguous. There is nothing in an electric car that inherently makes it require less parts replacement (note you specifically stated "parts replacement"). Please cite an unbiased source that proves what you are stating, and it should be proven of the life of the vehicle that would be 120,000 miles as a baseline (I'm giving you a break here an not even including it's time in the secondary market (as a high-milaged used car).
Anythying on a car can fail with any type of drivetraiin, and they do regularly... It's a difficult environment to operate in... Do you think that somehow motors are more reliable than internal-combustion engines (there is no evidence of that, and there might be evidence to the contrary if somebody would do the unpopular work of validating it)? Do you think the air-conditioning system in an EV magically lasts longer? The stereo? The interior? The door locks? Do you think EV motors will never fail? Do you think the batteries magically last forever???
And before you make your 8 to 10 year battery warrranty claims... ... Like every other battery, EV batteries lose their ability to hold a charge after each use... Maybe you can go 100+ miles when they are new, but what are you going to do when they are down to 30 miles of life? That's not failure, so they won't have to replace it... But it's not usable. Ready to fork over 5-grand for new batteries?
If you meant in regards to general maintenance, do you honestly think drivers will have the opportunity to avoid periodic visits to the dealer for scheduled service, or somehow it will be cheaper? They will still require the cars to have service, it will just be different parts that need attention. Dealers will not lose a dime over EVs. - erkokite, on 07/24/2010, -0/+4In a perfect world, yes. But in this case, you first have to find a buyer. Who would want to buy out the suppliers for for parts for shaky companies? You will also have a period of time in which these parts are not being produced- i.e. a buyer has to be found, new management will have to come in place, some workers will be laid off, new workers will be brought in, the tooling may have to be moved to new facilities, the tooling and processes would have to be integrated into the new companies workflow, etc... All the while, Ford, who is barely holding on to begin with, can no longer get parts and tooling for making its vehicles.
- DarkShroud, on 07/24/2010, -0/+4In North America German brand cars (Volkswagen) are made in Mexico. Meanwhile the Ford Fiesta now for sale in the US was designed & tested in Germany. Where a lot of Ford's European cars come from.
- absurdist, on 07/24/2010, -0/+3I would refer you to the collapse of the British automobile industry in the 1970s-1980s. Bear in mind that at one time BMC was the second largest car manufacturer world wide. Contrast that with the mighty *ahem* force that British automotive manufacturing is now. British industry never really recovered from the collapse of the automotive segment and all the ancillary businesses associated with it.
- brad3378, 22 hr 12 min ago, -0/+3You're over simplifying how companies are valued.
You can't just say that their net worth should be based on % market share.
It would be just as silly to imply that the Ferrari & Lamborghini corporations are only worth 0.01% of what Ford is worth because they only have 0.01% of Ford's market share.
Don't forget that Ford still has a lot of debt on their books that GM no longer has to worry about. - u2canfail, on 07/24/2010, -0/+3He is absolutely correct. Most suppliers serve several companies. Yup, some supply four companies, like Toyota, Ford GM and Chrysler. That supplier lost overnight 50% of his business, and went under, closed down. Now, he cannot supply the remaining companies. The remaining companies have no parts. There is the problem! The remaining companies cannot build 1 car until they have the parts. And there are suppliers, to the supplier, materials, shippers, the jobs lost never regained, just exactly how bad did you want this to get?
- brad3378, on 07/24/2010, -4/+7That's not even the whole story.
Just look at guys like me that are earning 6 figure salaries working for the military industrial complex when my colleagues and I should be back home in the USA working as an Automotive Engineers - helping to *pay* taxes rather than being a burden on everybody else by *spending* your taxes.
If I felt like I had a safe future (and if there were jobs), I'd seriously consider taking a 50% pay cut to go home to Detroit (A city I love by the way), but for now, I'm staying where I'm at - Hating my job while watching Fox News in a war zone with a bunch of right-wingnut contractors while nodding and pretending to agree with every nauseating thing they say. It's Ironic that working in a war zone is less stressful than working in the American Auto industry, but it's the truth. Frankly, it's just not worth it to take a pay cut for a more stressful job and have absolutely no sense of career security, let alone job security. If there's going to be a hero in the Auto industry, it's not going to be me. Sorry. Been there, done that.
It's incredibly frustrating, but the American consumer has spoken.
If the American public doesn't want us to build cars, we'll find jobs elsewhere.
Maybe it will be your neighbor's job.
Maybe it will be yours.
/Ex Auto Mechanic
/Ex Automotive Mechanical Engineer.
- Chestnutridge, 23 hr 3 min ago, -0/+2Where did you get the idea that Ford had "No Debt."? They have a lot of debt now and they had a lot of debt before the bailout. The difference betweem them and the other car companies was that they had gone to the well a couple of years ago and had borrowed a bunch of cash (prior to the financial market freeze) as part of their forward thinking plan of remaking their company. Today they have about $27 Billion in debt which is down from their high as they retiring it rapidly this year as they have been doing so well.
- Jack416, on 07/24/2010, -1/+3I assure you that in the aftermath of the bailout, Ford's fanbase was just starting to grow. It's only recently they've gained a nice following.
- gkiltz, on 07/24/2010, -1/+3If you really take a deeper look, even once you consider Toyota, Honda and VW, Ford is the most privately owned and privately financed of ANY of them. They also didn't take government money.
This shouldc give them more flexibility going forward. They could always increase the amount of public holding if they needed to. - Stochio, on 07/24/2010, -1/+3Let me refine your "probably": Reid has *never* held a job in the private sector.
- Chestnutridge, on 07/24/2010, -0/+2The U.S. governement is expected to reap about 10-12 billion from this IPO selling about 20-24 percent of their holdings. While the bailout was about 50B, the US would need to realize 70 Billion to break even. The overall IPO is expected to be in the 15-20 billion range. But these numbers are still in flux as market conditions make it difficult to value the IPO. GM is currently valued about 90 Billion.
After you pick up you ass, you might want to do some reading:
Here is a Reuters article that outlines the plan:
http://biz.thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/201 ...
- Nevarius, on 07/24/2010, -0/+2And that's pretty much the best case scenario. The new owner may have totally different plans that don't involve the car industry.
The whole issue to me at least comes down to damage control. Last thing needed is a domino effect going through a whole industry, that filters down to that industries suppliers and the supplier of that supplier etc.. Which can have effects in other areas where suppliers supply product for other industries/companies.
Sadly if a major player crashes, the ripple can rip through a % of our economy making things much worse.
In my opinion, your opinion (@ZooMigo) is overly simplistic. Though it would be nice if it worked that way... Would make damage control much much easier and cheaper. - absurdist, on 07/24/2010, -1/+3We already have an economic model of precisely this type. BMC was at one time the second largest producer of cars in the world. When it (as BL) collapsed in the 1970s-80s, it damaged British manufacturing to a point that it has yet to recover from. Would you prefer a nation of employed factory workers or a nation of chavs on the dole?
- brad3378, on 07/24/2010, -0/+2JQP123
The reason why GM is worth more to investors now is because their bankruptcy wiped out their debt obligations.
- u2canfail, on 07/24/2010, -0/+2Greedy unions are only part of the picture. All of the big three has lousy management. They spent years thinking "quality" did not count. Management salaries skyrocketed. Golden parachutes were offered when management changed. Silly me, I don't blame the Unions. When the industry was making money, they bargained for good packages. I somehow, think you have done the same.
- JQP123, on 07/24/2010, -2/+3"They point out that this fall GM plans to do an IPO on 1/5 of the stock temporarily held by the U.S. government."
ROTFLMA !!!!
Whatever you and your mystery financial analysts are smoking must be some good stuff.
So by your estimate, 1/5 of 60% (i.e 12%) of GM stock is worth at least $15 billion? This places GM's total market value at $15/0.12 = $125 billion? Get outta here?
In comparison, Ford, whose market share is only slightly less than GM, is currently valued at only $45 billion. What could possibly make GM worth 3X Ford? Answer - Nothing within reason. - swordedge, on 07/24/2010, -0/+1They said "no thank you"... that is not begging for money. Ford had enough assets to whether the down turn. Their opinions, however, were appreciated by the government. If senators could run major corporations, they'd be running major corporations.
- Show 51 - 95 of 95 discussions