V8 Ford

I expect that emmisions regulations would be a bigger problem for a race spec engine than fuel economy.

I don't know if you can personally go to a federal reserve bank and buy a bond, but the whole way the fed works is by buying and selling bonds on the open market to change interest rates by changing the money supply.

Only in the short term. The fed also sells bonds.

Most likely it means that China has decided that they don't want to sacrifice monetary policy tools for exports any more. It'll be interesting to see what happens to the Yuan and China's exports to the US if this is the case.

I think the CX-7 is on some weird Mazda unique chassis based on the C1.

Economist have been wrong about two big things in the past hundred years. 1. That large money supply oscillations have no effect on output. It turns out that they do, as seen by the great depression 2. That inflation reduces unemployment and inereases output. It turns out that this is only a short term relation, and this violates elementary economic rules. Using this assertion, worldwide growth balooned in the 60s then collapsed in the 70s. Economics is a science like any other. It's based on theory supported by observation and is valid because it can support its assertions. Wealth correlates to output per capita, see the attachment (data from US census and BEA). I'd be concerned about wage stagnation if it was an abonormal feature. It isn't. Sit back and relax. Wages will increase just like the economy will recover. Short term pertubations are nothing to be concerned about.

I get 15MPG averaging those speeds. Bloody Hybrid cheats its electric motor magic

Not me working, my Dad's been over there with Ford and its subsidiaries for a while and I've been over to visit several times; according to him he's set the company record for living in the worst places Ford operates longer than anyone in the history of the company. I've seen that quote before, but I"m not sure who its from or where he's going with it. Wealth isn't just from the manufacturing industry as both goods and services are tradeable and improve welfare. $5 output from an auto company contributes just as much as $5 output from a software firm or $5 output from the design branch of a company that then manufactures the product in Asia. Output per person is as high as its ever been in the US and is still growing (well, not exactly at moment, but give it a couple years), so I don't see the wealth of the US declining.

I don't remember the smell of the air, but I do remember a distinct burning sensation in my throat and wiping my nose only to fund soot on my finger. Nanjing is like a paradise compared to where I was though. I'll agree with you about the environmental state of China, but I don't agree with you about manufacturing. I don't think it is essential to the health of a nation that it be the dominant industry, and I think that its decline from preeminent status in the US is a result of the US becoming more educated (there's still manufacturing, and the value of manufactured goods is at an all time high, it just isn't the largest section of the economy any more). It takes guts, muscle and drive to succeed in a manufacturing job. As desirable as those attributes are, unfortunately, education is a lot more rare in the world. Economical allocation of resources is going to see that the jobs go were the greatest supply of qualified labor is available. The guys in China work in the factories because it beats the hell out of being a subsistance farmer, which is the same thing that happened in the industrial revolution in he western world. The standard of living sucks compared to what it is today, but it was a hell of a lot better than scraping an existence in the wilderness. And the standard of living is only going to get better.

I hope that by turbo kit, and sport suspension, they mean ecoboost and revoknuckle. :hyper:

The prius, tundra and tacoma were all in the top 20 last march, and are now nowhere to be found. I can understand a drop off in prius sales with the new model comming, but what happened to the other two?

It's sustainable as long as it doesn't reach an unreasonable amount of the GDP, so long as growth compensates for interest payments. It's a bad thing and I certainly don't support it (how in the hell did they find 1 trillion dollars worth of new projects?), but it isn't as bad as some people make it out to be. My understanding on recessions is that they're caused by human fallibility and mistakes. People make poor decisions and wrongly allocate resources, then everything falls apart once the mistake is realized and the damage spreads when people, fearing for their jobs, cut spending and deepen the recession. Maybe they do serve a weeding purpose, but if they do the government has been interfiling with this process for decades with the fed and spending, and this recession is no different.

To put things in perspective, the federal debt increased from 51% of the GDP to 75% of the GDP under bush. Assuming 2% growth on the year, it will increase from 75% of the GDP to 87% of the GDP under Obama in his first year. His budget projects that it will go to 92% by the end of his second term. With a no recessions prediction, the percent national debt will stabilize at around 88% of the GDP while the government runs a 600 billion dollar deficit indefinitely. Under the current budget, 8 years of Obama will increase the federal debt by 7.2 trillion dollars. The only problem is that's a no recession prediction. The Bush budgets projected a return to the black by 2014 with a no recession prediction. Yeah, Bush didn't do anything about spending, but he never increased the national budget by 33% in one year (1 trillion dollars more spending between 2008 and 2009, accounting for almost all of the deficit for this term and the rest of the projections), and Bush doesn't set the budget anymore. The one saving grace for both of them is that the debt won't approach over 100% of the GDP, which is when it becomes really problematic. Running a deficit is bad for economic growth of a nation, but as long as its reasonably lower than the entire GDP, growth prevents it from becoming a real problem (like would be implied by political adverts). http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/asset.aspx?AssetId=764

Total costs aren't the problem with unions, marginal costs are. Having higher costs per output (directly proportional to labor) than a competotor puts a company at a huge disadvantage, both in profits and total sales. That said, after the concessions labor costs are very competitive and a lot more had to go wrong than unions for Chrysler to go bankrunpt.

The tax credits help too, and I'm going to guess and say that the costs of developing the first working hybrid systems were a lot more than developing the evloutionary upgrades.

I absolutely agree with you, nick. Speech means you have the right to say it, not that someone has to say it for you.

Still way too early to call, but I expect Obama to be reelected. Economic circumstances will favor him; I doubt that the recession will last until 2012, and the wage cycle is overdue for growth (it's been stagnant for several years now). As far as politics in the US are concerned, a strong economy heavily favors the incumbent, which basically means the only way he'll lose is if he does something to offend the moderates and his current pole numbers show he hasn't done anything of the sort yet. Wild cards: The budget. IMO, the deficit is probably the biggest thing that could hurt him in the next election (unless he implements gas taxes), especially if he runs against a credible fiscal conservative Congress. Independents like opposing parties in congress and the white house. Congressional outcomes in 2010 could greatly impact his reelection bid.

I"m not sure I understand what you're saying. If you're talking about economic stability, without cycles, I don't think that it's a realizable goal. Human fallibility and uncertainty/lack of information in the short run almost ensure that it will happen. If you're talking about economic models, the simple one's I've studied qualitatively describe the most important phenomenon of a macroeconomy pretty well, monetary effects included.

60's growth around the world was grossly inflated by monetary policy. Following an economic fad, central banking systems around the world ran inflationary policy to reduce unemployment and raise output. Unfortunately, it was only a short term relation, and the direct result was high inflation and high unemployment in the 70's and early 80's. In order to curb the mal effects of the inflationary policies pursued from the 60's onwards, the Fed was forced to make significant contractions in money supply, causing the large recession in the 1980's.

Umm, he just got elected president, he should be popular. Almost all presidents start out with high approval ratings. Only Clinton and Ike have finnished out their second terms with above 60 % approval ratings (in the time that they've started taking them).

IIRC, GM delayed updates on the Tahoe, Silverado and GMC equivilents. I think that's what the jpd80 was getting at.

Knowing congress's position towards trucks and SUV's, I expect that any GM announcement towards developing new ones will go over as well as the banking bonuses did.

It's not a problem because trade deficit/surplus doesn't affect output, it's just a distribution of who's buying more foreign goods. It isn't something that can be done away with because any efforts to forcibly change it would result in conditions worse off than they were before. The foreign exchange market ensures that Net Capital Outflow (net investment abroad) is equal to Net Exports. ie, running a trade deficit means negative net capital outflow; negative net capital outflow Derivation: American goods must be bought in dollars, and foreign goods must be bought in foreign currencies. Outflow: Dollars are supplied abroad when an American investors exhange dollars for foreign currency for dollars in order to buy foreign assets, and vice versa for foreign investors exhanging foreign currency for dollars to purchase american assets. Export: Foreign firms buy American goods with dollars, those dollars obtained from American investment abroad (outflow) and vice versa. Running a trade deficit requires that less dollars in foreign lands than foreign currency in the US, therefore there must be a net capital inflow to the US. edit: well, you can change short term net exports and output through currency manipulation and deficit spending, but those have costs of their own

It's easy to grow quickly like Japan did or China is doing right now. It's called the catch up effect; simply put, it's easier to grow when you're behind the curve because it's easier to impliment existing technologies than it is to develop new ones.

We import more than we export now. That isn't a problem (it doesn't change output within the US), and it has nothing to do with outsourcing since a trade deficit indicates net foreign investment within the US.