March 2003 is also when the Iraq war began.
Posted by Aakash at January 21, 2006 08:11 PMeconomically it will be an interesting year. I think we still have an inverted yield curve. And it looks like Bush/Cheney will un-invert it by drving up long term interest rates. That is a unique strategy, perhaps driven by the fact they have to refinance a humongous lot of short term securities that were issued in an attempt to keep long term rates low to keep their lousy economic recovery going.
Inverted yield curves mean slower growth, and there is some evidence they predict recessions. They do seem to predict recessions pretty good when they occur when interest rates are rising, as long term rates may do now. I gues Fed will ease off short term rates.
Rapid increase in housing prices and consumers tapping capital gains for consumption has propped up consumer spending, so that will slow this year too.
Coming from a long time "Ford family" (though I am not one anymore), I find it sad to see that company do so poorly. Ford may keep afloat because of its large foreign operations, as it has in previous tough times for US automakers. I don't understand why they can't use what they know from their European and Asian lines to improve their cars in the US. Anyone know?
Posted by at January 21, 2006 08:31 PM"replacement for the popular Taurus" says it all -- why replace a car that people were buying?
Posted by Brian Boru at January 21, 2006 09:19 PMAnyone whose ever owned a Taurus knows why they don't make them anymore, they sucked. It was the most expensive and least satisfying ride I've ever owned. I only buy Japanese now and will never buy an American auto again.
It's true you know:
Found On The Road Dead.
And you can spell it backwards:
Driver Returned On Foot.
Posted by rlp at January 21, 2006 11:16 PMFORD? GM?
Ha.
Give my Bavarian or give me a bike.
And yes, labor is fucked. The great radical conservative backlash against the fictional Liberal Bogeyman has achieved prong one of its two-pronged goal: Entrenched subservience of American labor. Enjoy what you've reaped, blue-collar GOP voters. You can join the Chinese and Mexican labor forces in being globalization's bitch. Good things them faggots can't hook up though, right?
Prong two, global American political domination, isn't going as well for the rad cons, which is kind of a bummer given America's role in the past as savior of the free world. I guess when you lie, torture, and bully, other nations might look upon you and say "fuck that shit."
Anyone who votes without assigning their economic situation highest priority is a fucking ignorant fool.
Posted by God Of War at January 22, 2006 06:11 AM
As Sun-Tzu said in The Art of War, one must know one's enemy to be victorious. Since the neocons only know labor from having to live amongst us, we are currently losing.
If the neocons want to win against the world, they should have to go live in it. Only then would they stand a chance!
Posted by pessimist at January 22, 2006 06:19 AMA while ago, Ford bought up a line of luxury car companies and rather than learn what these car companies were doing right, sought to impose what Ford has been doing wrong on these new divisions. It's worked.
Posted by at January 22, 2006 09:57 AMI don't understand why they can't use what they know from their European and Asian lines to improve their cars in the US.
I've always wondered why GM, as well as Ford, don't do this. Both make a range of decently stylish and competitive non-embarrassing cars in Europe and Australia.
Yet in North America they consistently embrace a tacky, softly-sprung, luxo-barge aesthetic which I presume has some adherents in the insular Midwestern culture of Detriot executives, but is hopelessly naff on the west coast.
Very few people under age 40 in California would even consider an American sedan, and the rest of the country is headed in the same direction due to years of huckster sales tactics, half-assed corner-cutting in product design and execution, shoddy quality and reliability and thinly-veiled contempt for the customer by the Big 3.
The first Taurus was a serious attempt to match the imports in vehicle dynamics, which soon became a millstone let down by subpar reliability and build quality, and a cash-cow, 'we can produce junk and they'll still buy it' corporate indifference to it's durability issues. A story repeated way too often by the self-important numbskulls running Detroit, always going for the quick buck instead of focusing on continuously improving the product like the Japanese.
A marginal note about tables. You may not have time to learn how to do html tables, but by using just one tag you don't already know (the <pre> tag) you can put up (ugly, but correctly spaced) tabular material.
For what it's worth ...
With kind regards,
Dog, etc.
searching for home
Thanks, Dog! I'll give it a try!
Posted by pessimist at January 22, 2006 01:17 PMI've always wondered why GM, as well as Ford, don't do this.
What do they have that's so impressive? The Cortina? Opel? They bring this stuff over and slap it in American cars and it's still crap. Crap is crap, European or American.
Wanna sell cars to Americans? Make them trouble free for 200,000 miles minimum. When the old Taurus blows its tranny at 60,000 miles, or the GM 3 litres blow their intake gaskets at 60,000 miles, they can't compete. Stop selling what is largely shit. That's how they can compete.
Posted by phidipides at January 22, 2006 02:29 PMWhen we are out of oil, I will market my stem-cell powered line of vehicles, and see how many "early bipeds" revert back to their original mode of transportation out of moral outrage. "Stemcellica"?
Posted by TIKI AL at January 22, 2006 07:01 PM"Stemcellica"?
I thought that was the latest Tom Cruise movie?
Posted by phidipides at January 22, 2006 07:05 PMWasn't that a TV show starring Jane Fonda? Or was it Raquel Welch?
Posted by pessimist at January 22, 2006 07:37 PMYeah, American car companies might go out of business. They spend too much on health care and pensions. And they make cars that fall apart. Why buy one of their cars?
Posted by muckdog at January 22, 2006 09:20 PMStemcellica is a Toyota celica coverted to run on stem cells.
Posted by TIKI AL at January 22, 2006 10:47 PMOn the yield curve, I need to ask: how exactly would Bush/Cheney drive up long-term interest rates?
The Fed doesn't control long-term rates; the level is driven primarily by the financial community's confidence about inflation rates going into the future.
Now, you could argue that B/C have spent their entire time in office doing everything they possibly could to drive up long-term rates. By running up such a rediculous debt, they significantly increase the risk that at some some point in future, the government will try to "inflate" its way out of it. i.e. it would purpousely get too loose with the money supply (i.e. "print too much money"), and create a high-inflation situation, thus causing the value of its debt to shrihk. Historically, many governments have used this technique for just such a purpose.
But the fact that long-term rates have remained so low reflects extreme confidence that this will not happen. And there's good reason for this confidence: beating down inflation has been the Federal Reserve's absolute top priority since the early 1980's. In fact, they induced a pretty sever recession at that time, in order to kill the inflation that dogged us in the 70's. Note that the high inflation of the 70's was not due directly to high oil prices; rather, it was the goverment's response to high oil prices that caused it. They had eased monetary policy (i.e. lowered short-term rates) to try to "give the economy a kick" to counter the high energy costs. But since this meant an increase in the money supply, inflation soon rose.
Alan Greenspan, his predecessor, and now his successor, have all understood this very well. Despite the recession it caused in the short run, the new approach to monetary policy adopted in the early 80's has proven spectacularly effective in killing inflation.
So it's ironic, then, that it's the merciless raising of the short-term rates in the last few years that is precisely what is holding long-term rates down. The Fed would rather spark another recession than see inflation get out of hand again, and everyone making those long-term loans knows it.
As an aside, here's an interesting historical example: in the run-up to the 1992 election, George Bush Sr. got Greenspan to lower the short-term rates quite a bit, so that the economy would be looking good come election time. But long-term rates refused to follow them down, causing the largest gap between the two that we've seen so far. Why were the long-term rates so stubborn? It was because of the massive amount of goverment debt that Regan and Bush had run up; long-term investors were still afraid that the govt. would try to let inflation take care of the debt problem. When Clinton was elected, he communicated a very strong commitment to attacking that debt, without resorting to inflation. This included what the conservatives like to call "the largest tax increas in history." That tax increase may have raised one kind of drag on the economy, but the long-term confidence that it inspired succeeded in lowering those long-term rates, sparking new vigor in the economy.