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Posted
Oct 06 2009, 11:51 AM
by
Minyanville
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
This article is written by Minyanville's Jeff Macke We should have known this would end horribly. The first "red" flag was the administration inventing a job called Pay Czar.
There's a reason the communists whacked the last legitimate Czar and got away with it. The Red Army's horrifying power and sadism helped, but the real reason was the public figuring that Romanov's idiocy made it likely anyone else would be better.
Nicholas Romanov sent Russian troops to the front in World War I unarmed with instructions to use the guns of the dead Russian troops ahead of them. Pay Czar
Kenneth Feinberg is apparently set on fixing the markets by forcing banks to take half their pay in stock options.
You may remember stock options from the bubble days when everyone at Yahoo (YHOO) from the chief to the company chefs became zillionaires and retired in their 20s. That was about $300 in Yahoo share price ago.
So, in an allegedly coordinated effort, the administration has openly rigged the stock market, bought General Motors (MTLQQ), used taxpayer dollars to fund Cash for Clunkers (a program which curiously labeled cars like my Hummer and other toxic fog machine SUVs as "efficient"), and is now mandating stock options instead of cash for highly paid executives at firms that willingly or unwillingly took the low interest loans -- which were largely responsible for killing anything resembling a free market in the US.
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Posted
Oct 02 2009, 07:31 AM
by
Douglas McIntyre
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
Rumors, credible rumors, are beginning to circulate in the car industry and the automotive press, that Chrysler may not make it another year primarily due to its falling sales and growing financial losses at partner Fiat.
Chrysler sold a 62,197 cars in September, down 42% from the same month last year. The figure was down from 93,222 in August when traffic to dealers was pushed up by the ”cash for clunkers” program.
Chrysler’s problems may only be beginning and, if so, Fiat, the ”managing partner” among Chrysler’s owners may not be able to keep the American company intact.
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Posted
Sep 30 2009, 12:27 PM
by
Kim Peterson
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
General Motors turned to eBay (EBAY) last month in a desperate attempt to sell more cars, hoping for a new sales channel as it shuts down dealerships across the country. It didn't work. After just seven weeks, GM has decided to end the online program. Dealers say it didn't help them sell more vehicles -- in fact, buyers started lowballing them for better deals, The Wall Street Journal reports. "We thought the program was successful but that this was not the right time," GM's sales chief told the Journal. GM said it would try again with eBay next year. If GM does revive the effort, it will have learned plenty of lessons.
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Posted
Sep 24 2009, 12:13 PM
by
Kim Peterson
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
 Traders are hot on zombie stocks these days, trying to make a buck from companies everyone else has written off as dead.
Washington Mutual went bankrupt, but its stock is suddenly smoking -- gaining 64% Monday, the Los Angeles Times reports. No one really thinks the company is going to magically return to life soon, but investors are hoping even a tiny uptick in the share price will bring profits.
Remember Lehman Brothers? Shares of the bankrupt bank have quintupled in the last four weeks, the Times reports. And General Motors -- or, should I say, Motors Liquidation Co. (MTLQQ) -- has seen shares more than double.
It's a dangerous game, playing around in these stocks that common sense would tell you to stay away from. So who's dabbling in the dead?
Experts tell the Times that aggressive day traders are likely to blame. They're snapping up enormous volumes of the shares, looking for something as small as a 1-cent increase on a 1 million share block
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Posted
Sep 01 2009, 09:49 AM
by
Kim Peterson
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
 Don't be fooled by the headlines. Yes, the cash-for-clunkers program helped Ford (F) boost sales a remarkable 17% in August from a year ago. It was the first time since 2006 that sales went up for two months straight, The New York Times reports.
For a brief few weeks, the auto industry sprang back to life. People flooded into dealerships, buying cars into the wee hours of the morning and taking advantage of rebates of as much as $4,500. Bing: More on cash-for-clunkers
But as soon as cash-for-clunkers ended, dealerships turned back into ghost towns. “Dealers are saying as soon as the program ended everything stopped dead,” industry consultant John Casesa told Bloomberg. Don't expect next month's sales to be as cheery.
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Posted
Aug 11 2009, 10:15 AM
by
Kim Peterson
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
 Things are so bad for General Motors that the automaker is now selling cars on eBay (EBAY).
Actually, it's not the worst idea. People can buy GM cars and trucks from some 225 California dealers at this eBay site starting Tuesday, according to Bloomberg. It's a desperate attempt by GM to find more sales channels as it cuts the number of its dealerships by 42%. GM is selling new Chevrolet, Pontiac, Buick and GMC cars, and buyers can accept the "buy it now" price or make a lower offer, which starts an online negotiation. After a car is sold, a California dealer will contact the buyer to arrange financing and delivery. The move could be aimed at bolstering GM sales in California, where its market share is only about 13.5% (the national average is 19%). GM says it chose California because
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Posted
Aug 10 2009, 11:23 AM
by
Kim Peterson
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
 General Motors (MTLQQ) is on its way to becoming a new, squeaky-clean General Motors, leaving all its garbage behind.
It gets to say goodbye to unwanted factories and liabilities. And it gets to coast away from hundreds of acres of land, some of which are so polluted that they threaten human health.
The old GM gets about $1.2 billion to wind down its operations, The Detroit Free Press reports. Most of that money will go to lawyers and other fees. But the environmental cleanup alone of GM's toxic sites will cost about $530 million.
Now, city and state officials across the country are looking at GM's abandoned properties, and wondering where the money will come from to clean them up.
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Posted
Aug 07 2009, 03:54 AM
by
Douglas McIntyre
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
GM says it will sell 1.4 million cars in China this year. It sold about 180,000 in the US in July. The critical difference between its costs in the two markets is that many of GM’s Chinese vehicles are made in facilities owned by joint ventures with local car companies. Others are produced in manufacturing facilities with low labor costs. And, GM’s sales are growing in China and dropping in the US.
GM’s expenses in it home market may be falling because it has gone through Chapter 11. Unfortunately, the firm’s sales in its home market were down about 20% last month, so its restructuring cost improvements may end up doing little good.
The No.1 US auto company might be better off setting up joint ventures with other large car companies with factories in America to produce its vehicles. Ford (F), Toyota (TM), and Chrysler already have substantial manufacturing capacity some of which is underutilized.
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Posted
Aug 05 2009, 04:01 AM
by
Douglas McIntyre
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
General Motors' new chairman, Edward E. Whitacre Jr., says one of his major goals is to make certain that the No. 1 U.S. car company stays No.1. GM will find it very hard to measure up.
In an exclusive interview with The Wall Street Journal, Whitacre said being No. 1 is “the position we should strive for… (as) an American company that employs hundreds of thousands of people…We just want to be No. 1.”
If wishes were horses, all the beggars would ride. GM is losing ground to the competition at an alarming rate. In July it sold 187,582 vehicles, down 20% from the same period a year ago. Toyota (TM) sold 174,872, down 11% and Ford (F) sold 158,354, up 2%. The spread between the top three manufacturers has become remarkably small.
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Posted
Aug 03 2009, 03:57 AM
by
Douglas McIntyre
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
 Ford (F) made two audacious decisions recently, decisions made in an industry where audacity died when Lee Iaccoca left the business. William Clay Ford, Jr., the company’s CEO since 2001, went outside the industry and brought in Boeing (BA) executive Alan Mulally to replace him in September 2006. Mulally may have been a good executive but he was not a “car man”, the kind of manager who had been running The Big Three for years.
Mulally, in turn, bet the company in order to take advantage of the opportunity to fill its treasury later in 2006 just before the auto market was swamped by one of the largest downturns in history. Ford got $23 billion in convertible notes and a revolving credit line for pledging an extraordinary amount of the firm’s assets.
All three of the major credit agencies cut their views of Ford once the capital infusion was announced. The majority of auto analysts believed that Ford had given too much for too little.
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