airglow

Another Crisis Looms Right Around the Corner

I can’t believe how many Wing Nut doomsday cult members are out there reading Seeking Alpha.

I don’t know where you got your Debt to GDP ratio number, but it is off by a factor of 4.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

The actual US Debt to GDP ratio is about 70%, even after the huge deficits of 2008 and 2009.

Japan’s Debt to GDP ratio is about 200%, I don’t see mass starvation or hyper inflation in Japan; please explain how Japan has managed to keep its country from falling into anarchy over the last 20 years?

Why would anyone buy Gold? I know it was money for most of the history of civilization, but it hasn’t been for several generations. Do all of you doomer Wing Nuts believe we will revert to using Gold as Money? If it gets as bad as the author and most of the survivalists cheering him on think it will, Gold will only have value for use in Jewelry and Electronics, as it has since the world went off of the silly, arbitrary, anachronistic Gold standard over half a century ago.

Electric Car Manufacturers Inspire New Paradigms

Hey James, if that's a compact car I'm Brad Pitt!

The Think Global would definitly be classified as a mini-car, several size classes smaller than a compact car like the Honda Civic or Ford Focus. This is a City only car, not suitable for most Americans who don't spend all of their time in Manhattan or downtown LA. I don't even want to think of what one of those things will look like after it takes on Suburban.

Electric cars a still a joke. They are either glorified golf cart city cars like this one or they are only for the very wealthy like the Tesla. They are also useless if you ever need to drive over 100 to 200 miles in one trip.

As soon as someone comes up with all day range (300 miles plus) or quick charge capability (less than 30-60 minutes) for a reasonable price (25k - 40k), electric cars will start to take over. The Chevy Volt actually sounds like the logical bridge until all day range or quick charging becomes available.

With a top speed of only 65 MPH and a 100 mile range, the Think Global will remain a niche City Car for conspicuous green consumers who aren’t' concerned about safety.

Fed Considers GM Buy-In: Digging a Deeper Hole

Huh???

I can't think of any electric vehicles available today that meet all three of your standards. Tesla does and Fisker probably will meet the first two, viable and street worthy, but they certainly aren't affordable unless you work on Wall Street and get bonuses 10 times the size of most Americans salaries. Even the viable part of those two has yet to be proven.

All of the other electric vehicles I'm aware of are hardly what any reasonable person I know would call "street worthy". They are all glorified golf carts that fall somewhere between a Smart FourTwo and a motorcycle for safety and usefulness outside of any urban core.

On Apr 14 03:02 PM chistletoe wrote:

> I now know of three separate start-up companies which are manufacturing
> viable, street-worthy, affordable electric vehicles inside the USA.
>
> Our government could launch a very credible "electric car race" with
> China along the same lines as the race to the moon 50 years ago.
> Such a race would benefit schools, technology, innovation spin-offs,
> jobs, energy independence, and if we win, restore a bit of the prestige
> of american ingenuity.
>
> Or, we can keep throwing money into the pit.

Ford, GM on the Chopping Block?

As leisureworld stated, what's your point? This is all very old news.

From all of the analysis I've read, it will probably cost the US Government far less to prop up Ford and GM than it will if they let them go bankrupt. If you add up the direct and indirect unemployment costs, pension obligations, healthcare obligations etc., it is far cheaper to loan these two 25, 50 even 100 billion dollars to keep them going. I would love to here a congressman or senator explain to his/her auto worker constituents how they found 700 billion to bail out the greedy silk-suited millionaire bankers in NYC, but just couldn’t come up with 50 billion for an industry that accounts for 1 in 11 American jobs and produces something of tangible value and utility. I also believe roughly half of all US manufacturing problems are directly related to unfair trade and subsidies foreign governments give to their manufacturers. Since the US government has done almost zero to level the playing field, they are at lease partly responsible for the predicament Ford, GM and Chrysler find themselves in.

In the modern US economy, most Americans work in jobs that are pure overhead in the economy; Lawyers, servers, retail clerks, financial advisers, etc. I think some of these smug Toyota and BMW driving "overhead" workers will be shocked just how superfluous and peripheral there jobs are to the core economy in a serious recession. But they will probably still insist that all American cars are garbage and buying that Toyota had nothing to do with their plight.

Energy Stocks Are Too Cheap to Ignore - Barron's

The most amazing thing about many of the energy stocks is that they did not run up as fast as oil and natural gas, but are coming down even faster than oil and natural gas. There are some amazingly cheap trailing P/E's here, and even with $90 Oil and $8 natural gas, many of these stocks look really cheap on a forward P/E basis. HTE has a 20% dividend yield!