Rolling US Economy Into The Shitbin Thread

RE: David Brooks column

I lol'd at his 'recessions result in lowered hemlines' thing. OH NOEZ!

which retail stores will go bankrupt after nightmarish holiday sales?

my money's on borders

I'm just surprised they haven't gone out of business already.

"which retail stores will go bankrupt after nightmarish holiday sales?"

Best Buy? Comp USA?

chinese democracy will singlehandedly save best buy

Pier 1? It looks like the stock price is already factoring in a bankruptcy.

http://finance.google.com/finance?client=ob&q=NYSE:PIR

lol @ "retraining"
wasn't that promised when NAFTA was shoved thru

Pier 1 seems so stuck in the 80s that I do wonder how it's managed to survive this long.

big markup on wicker, apparently

a longish post from steve coll on how "a rescue of Detroit might help to jump-start a new national-energy strategy".

Krugman on the Chapter 11 option for automakers:

If the economy as a whole were in reasonably good shape and the credit markets were functioning, Chapter 11 would be the way to go. Under current circumstances, however, a default by GM would probably mean loss of ability to pay suppliers, which would mean liquidation — and that, in turn, would mean wiping out probably well over a million jobs at the worst possible moment.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/16/cars/

i like steve coll

fyi he went to a college well-known as the filming location for 'clueless' and 'dont be a menace to south central while drinking your juice in the hood"

haha he wrote something about meeting/hanging out with obama while at occidental

i hope that's what you're referring to so obliquely

max went there too and he is proud fyi

part of a long line of famous alumni including jack kemp, barack obama, KTLA entertainment reporter sam rubin, ben affleck and the dude from scissor sisters

Maybe running a dozen car ads every commercial break on prime time network television every day for the last 20+ years is not a smart way to spend your money.

Brainwashing is the only way for them to sell cars because their product is awful.

i thought obama transferred the hell outta there and is therefore not an alumnus

So can Occidental legitimately claim him as an alumnus? “By all means,” said Jim Jacobs, alumni relations director. “Who wouldn’t want to claim him as an alum?” Many colleges list anyone who has studied on campus for at least a year, he said.

I love the ads that run around Christmas...

"Jeez, if I could just figure out what to get....Eureka! That's it! I'll get my wife a 2009 Hyundai Elantra! Thank you, NBC, thank you!"

Like I was so close to buying a new boat for my kid and then I saw this car commercial and was like, oh shit dude, it's ON

fuck new cars

and I'm willing to go before Congress and testify as much.

has anyone posted about the attempted suicide on the floor of the Brazilian stock exchange?

http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/articles/2008/11/18/1226770397986.html

Brazil? Shit.

Trading was halted for a few minutes after the shot was fired on Monday.

Much like the US financial crisis, this thread will soon include the rest of the world.

rogermexico sez:

That potentially leaves a lot of empty factories, which the UAW ain't having. Hence the stalemate of the past 20 years. This nut's going to be very hard to crack, cash isn't going to fix it, and the UAW has shown no sign of willingness to make the concessions that the US industry's long-term health would require (I'm not certain it should - that question is VERY complicated and I just haven't thought it through clearly enough to take a position.)

this seems like an important point -- what should the uaw do? the sorkin dealbook column dandy don linked above echoes the prevailing punditocracy cry for blood from the uaw. but it's a hell of a thing to hang the future of the industry not to say the u.s. economy on union workers being willing to just take a big fuck-you. of course there are going to have to be concessions, restructuring and, basically, big job cuts. but what really angers a lot of people about the uaw is that they're in a position to resist any of that. the people calling for Bankruptcy Now! are mostly fantasizing about being able to finally stick it to the unions: $10 an hour, take it or leave it suckers. i'm tired of reading about "gold-plated benefits" as if decent health care and retirement benefits were some kind of crazy level of excess.

it seems to me that what a well-structured "bailout" (or assisted bankruptcy, if that's what happens) would do would be, first of all, to provide some breathing room and some leverage so that as those decisions about empty factories get made, everybody affected is as protected as possible; and then after that of course all the incentives for restructuring the industry along less stupid lines.

d-mouth claims seuss as an alum and he didn't graduate

in case anyone cares

mitt romney, being persuasive.

if a bailout's such a bad idea, why are so many horrible people against it?

Considering this disadvantage, Detroit has done a remarkable job of designing and engineering its cars.

Give the devil his due: Romney is OTM about this.

Second, management as is must go. New faces should be recruited from unrelated industries — from companies widely respected for excellence in marketing, innovation, creativity and labor relations.

This, however, is a bad joke. As Chryslerberus has already amply demonstrated. (And as GM demonstrated before that during the Zarella "brand management" years.) It's easy to look excellent in e.g. labor relations when you aren't working with existing contracts that were set in cement back when the world was your industry's oyster.

the real problem here is that toyota gets to operate factories in the south w/out having to deal with unions right??

if a bailout's such a bad idea, why are so many horrible people against it?

I already answered this question, and if you don't know, you don't know.

there are some HARD CORE absolute fucking history what's that morons on this thread I started and I am about to have a break down

for the record: drunk ass tombot still makes more sense than uh some people like that knoxville guy with kids

fight me now oof ow ok fight me tomorrow you're still a pussy

standing up sucks

haha. just cuz yr drunk doesn't make u rite.

cheering on the relentless forces of history like you actually know for sure what's going to happen next april doesn't prove anything. the question isn't whether there's a shakeout/restructuring/whatever form it takes in the works, question is how do you minimize the short-term damage, spread the pain, make things not-worst-case-scenario. government can/does have a role in this. government helped set it all up in the first place. it's silly to just pretend there's some platonic ideal here where everybody can stand back and just let "the inevitable" happen. however morally satisfying it might be on some level, the splatter patterns on the pavement aren't going to be all that aesthetically pleasing.

nothing is "inevitable." there are choices to be made.

(and anything mitt romney's cheerleading for, i'm against on basic fucking principle.)

Does Mitt still strap the family mutt to the car roof?

how do you minimize the short-term damage, spread the pain, make things not-worst-case-scenAAAAARGHHH.

no. the question is how do you give the next generation a foundation that isn't built on manure. Right now, I would gladly fuck over millions of american workers if it meant that their children, your children, and my prospective offspring would grow up understanding the difference between operating a sustainable, well-run enterprise versus a huge batch of cloudy incompetence masquerading as industry.

It's more than a little bit pathetic that so-self-identified-progressives are cheerleading the resurrection of a business model that belongs to their grandparents' generation, made possible by fascist delusions of grandeur

nobody that i know of is defending the performance of the american auto industry. but speaking of history, the real reason this matters is because of what the auto industry labor model represents in the u.s. -- which is, basically, the post-wwii social contract in america. living wages, social mobility and health care in exchange for broadly liberal economics (including no socialized medicine). of course that model's been on the fritz for decades, in the auto industry and elsewhere, but it has iconic value. it's been eroded, but not actually replaced by anything. what's going on here is a proxy fight over what happens next. since we have a liberal democratic president and congress coming in, it's easy maybe to think, ok, what comes next will be a modified and broadened social contract, a stronger safety net, all that. which is possible. but look at the model mccain laid out in the campaign. it was the most naked republican statement yet of social-contract-trashing, and just because it lost doesn't mean it won't come back and win in a few years. until further notice, i'm assuming it's the agenda of the minority party. that's why romney, bush et al have no interest in trying to sustain the ailing detroit model -- not because they want to replace it with something better, but because they don't want to replace it, period. no social contract, no unions, no health care, no nothing. they don't want g.m. to reinvent itself if it's still going to have the uaw in tow.

fwiw, i don't personally think the american auto industry is going to disappear in the next two months. i think even if nothing happens now, obama will still have the opportunity to deal with the issue as he wants to. and the auto execs are basically taking advantage of the current political situation to try to squeeze some cash out now while the power structure is bifurcated and it might come with fewer strings attached. all that seems likely. but the basic fight that's being engaged over whether to "help" detroit or "let it die" is not really about the auto industry at all, it's an early round in a much bigger fight about how we're going to structure our economy. and on that count, i don't at all trust romney, bush or mccain to be on anything within catapult distance of the right side. so if they see a g.m. bankruptcy as a step toward their fuck-you vision of the future -- and i think they do -- then i think, maybe it's not something to go rushing into.

nothing is "inevitable." there are choices to be made.

many recently discovered fossil records support this argument.

and "iconic value" is post facto, in all cases

I don't give a FUCK what some GOP shit wants, and I don't give a FLYING FUCK what some donkey party shit wants - I would like to see our fucking government STEP ASIDE for a NEW YORK FUCKING MINUTE, for once in my lifetime, and let american entrepreneurship take its fucking course. You may have heard of this INTERNET COMPANY, it is called GOOGLE, and some other COMPUTER COMPANIES, they go by APPLE and MICROSOFT, they kind of RUN THE WORLD, and that would be because our government was so fucking behind the times that they had no fucking idea how to shit on them while they were creating the future*. So can we PLEASE, PLEASE, shut up about the role of the united states government in our economy with regards to antiquated bullshit

* we live in the future. how's your future? mine's ok. I got a job still.

point being those poor stupid bastards in wherever are going to get screwed one way or another and somebody else can start the fucking charity for their children. meanwhile I'd like to see the next generation employed in concerns that have at least a snowballs's chance in hell of being competitive against the rest of the goddamned globe.

What kind of sucker plans his financial future around betting on corporations, unions, and the government to take care of him in the end anyway?

some of us are suckers, the rest are just drunks