mykie

Banks Are Yet Again Under Pressure

I would expand that blame list a bit further. I was in the auto business as the son of a Dodge Dealer back in the early sixties. I still have a photo of my father, the Chrysler representative and myself, posing around an alternative fueled car. We drove around in it. In other words, the technology to build and sell that car has been around over 40 years and yet, that car never made it to market. Why?

On a macro level, it has been waiting for leadership and vision. And if that leadership and vision doesn't come from the car makers then it must come from the government. It didn't. Not only didn't it come from the government but later, I think in the eighties, the CAFE laws were either abolished or lowered and the result was more gas guzzlers.

By now and from when gasoline hit $2.00 per gallon many years ago, shouldn't the post office, fire department, police departments, etc, be driving alternative fueled vehicles? Couldn't the cost of a recent pre-emptive and discretionary war with something to do with securing oil for future use been spent instead subsidizing these public fleets?

Finally we have a President with vision who will give us some leadership by aiming us towards alternative fuels and away from our oil addiction. So blame the car makers, our government and us, the ones that voted in an oil man for President.

On Nov 21 10:26 AM Lex Luz wrote:

> Seems to me that before we direct more blame and ire at the UAW,
> their contracts, and the workers they represent, we ought to consider
> the possibility that the executives and managers across these failed
> instituions MAY have had slightly more influence in setting "strategy"
> (in quotes for a reason) than did the swing shift frame assembly
> team at plant 413 or whatever.
>
> The fact is that all three of these companies have been failing for
> 35 years; their failure to anticipate and understand the first Honda
> Civic put the big three out of business as surely as did last year's
> gas-price bubble and the ongoing credit unwind.
>
> Of course the union contracts are a burden that can no longer be
> borne. No question that the UAW and its leadership have had a hand
> in driving this industry into the turf. The final responsibility,
> though, belongs with executives and management whose hubris through
> four decades of mind-bending decline now extends to going begging
> to Congress for a massive handout. The fact that they can't even
> be bothered to figure out how they would use that money realistically
> to transform their businesses is a clear indication of their incompetence
> first, and their arrogance more importantly.
>
> The unions are nothing more than a rat feasting on the hindquarters
> of this dead, rotting elephant.

Conventional Wisdom Will Be Wrong

Let's see...be contrarian in a contrarian market...seems like a double contrarian and thus........full cirlce back to conventional.

I say pick your favorite bouncing sector, (mine are the banks), pick a few ETF's, one up one down and then just watch those and nothing else. Learn where the bottom might be and how high a bounce might be and then sit by the comp and don't move...... You just have to eventually make money. (famous last words)