Winning in Maui: TPP Ministerial Negotiations Fail, with No Date Set for the Next Round
Winning a battle in the long campaign against TPP: It was “domestic politics” that preserved our national sovereignty
Read more...Category Archives: Auto industry
The Continuing Depopulation of Detroit
Detroit is getting the same treatment as Latvia and Ireland, and we are already seeing similar results in Greece, with most people who have good foreign job prospects taking a hike. But while Latvia and Ireland stabilized at much lower levels of output and have started to recover from their, Detroit, like Greece, looks like a failed state. And this is perversely seen as acceptable in America.
Read more...Dubious FX Broker CWM FX Claims Sports Celebrity Scalps, but Princess Anne Remains Unmolested
The CWM FX fraud bust, a murder, Princess Anne and some groping. It’s BAU in the world of sports sponsorship.
Read more...Wolf Richter: Subprime Pump-and-Dump Frenzy Heats Up
OK, today’s subprime securitization rage is in the auto-loan sector, not mortgages. About 31% of all outstanding auto loan balances are rated subprime. They’re the foundation of booming auto sales.
Read more...Wolf Richter: Subprime Spikes Auto Sales, Delinquencies Soar, Industry in Total Denial, Fallout to Hit Main Street
Stuffing people into cars they can’t afford and ultimately may not be able to pay for is big business.
Read more...Ferguson in Context on the Eve of the Grand Jury Decision
The “ground truth” of the protests, the forces arrayed against them, the grand jury, political economy in Ferguson, and Mike Brown’s father.
Read more...Corporate Profit Margins vs. Wages in One Disturbing Chart
Yves here. This brief post by Doug Short is even more important than it appears to be. We had an outburst of neoliberal orthodoxy in comments yesterday on a post that discussed how wealth of most households had fallen since 1987. Some readers assigned blame for stagnant average worker wages (which was a big contributor to the lack of growth in household wealth) to immigrants, particularly Mexicans and H1-B visa workers.
The Doug Short chart below looks at corporate profit share versus labor share. This pinpoints the degree to which wage stagnation is the result of corporate managers and executives succeeding in cutting the pie to favor themselves (executive pay has become increasingly linked to stock prices, and relentless focus on short-term earnings, as well as stock buybacks, do wonders for earnings per share).
Read more...US Corporate Executives to Workers: Drop Dead
The Washington Post has a story that blandly supports the continued strip mining of the American economy. Of course, in Versailles that the nation’s capitol has become, this lobbyist-and-big-ticket-political-donor supporting point of view no doubt seems entirely logical. The guts of the article: Three years ago, Harvard Business School asked thousands of its graduates, many […]
Read more...America: Europe and Canada’s Willing Chump
How America facilitates a labor and environmental race to the bottom, helping companies based in Europe, Canada, and Mexico.
Read more...Young Owners of Low-Budget GM Cars Weren’t Worth Saving
Writer libbyliberal describes how the Obama Administration’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration worked with GM for years to cover up the automaker’s ignition system defect that would lead to sudden power system failure. That fault is estimated to have caused at least 13 deaths and over 30 crashes. It’s also a textbook case of crapification.
Read more...Matt Stoller: Big Oil Hooked Americans on Credit Cards
The credit card industry gets short shrift when it comes to history.
Read more...Wolf Richter: The Next Tire To Drop On The US Economy
After the last few years of strong sales growth, the US auto industry may be headed for a world of hurt. If that happens, the US economy would suffer too.
Read more...Has the Developed World Hit “Peak Car Use”?
Yves here. While this piece provides a solid overview of the fallen status of cars, it misses an obvious contributor to the lack of enthusiasm for them among the young: with weak incomes and in many cases, heavy student debt loads, an automobile is too large an expense relative to what they get out of it.
Read more...Slate Tries Presenting Amazon’s Abusive Warehouse Jobs as Great Opportunities
A mere day after strikes at Amazon warehouses in Germany, which caught the attention of the media in the US, Slate ran as its lead piece in Moneybox an article that bears all the hallmarks of being a PR plant: Amazon Warehouses Are the New Factories.
I suspect the author, Emma Roller, wouldn’t recognize a factory if it fell on her.
Read more...CNI (UK) and its Lawyers Complain to Blogs, But Appear to Shy Away From the Daily Mail
CNI (UK)’s confusing attitude to its connections with Carbon Neutral Investments, service provider to carbon scams
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