The Carter Gilson Report

The best news to come out in a while. It seems that Toyota and GM are still pushing ahead with their plug-in hybrid models, and the competition is still pretty fierce.

Toyota plans to introduce its plug-in hybrid electric vehicle late this year, a year earlier than originally planned, and a year ahead of the Chevrolet Volt, a senior Toyota executive said Sunday.

James Lentz, the president of Toyota Motor Sales U.S.A., said in an interview that Toyota planned to initially make about 500 plug-in hybrids, which will be made available first to commercial customers. About 150 plug-ins will be slated for customers in the United States, Mr. Lentz said.

GM is hoping that the Volt will save it from the brink.  With Toyota pushing up their plug-in, it seems that there would be even more incentive for GM to speed up its development.

And given the economy right now, perhaps there could be some incentive to make them affordable?  Maybe?

Mitch McConnell, Senate Minority Leader, and first rate wanker, is looking to prolong the economic downturn as long as it means providing money to actual Americans through jobs:

“As of right now, Americans are left with more questions than answers about this unprecedented government spending, and I believe the taxpayers deserve to know a lot more about where it will be spent before we consider passing it.”

Nice of you to think of that now, Mitch.  You didn’t seem to think that was all that important when bailing out the banks, who are getting billions in public money with no oversight, but now you want to stick it to the citizens who are unemployed or underemployed and would be helped directly by an infrastructure-based stimulus plan.

It’s brazen, I’ll give him that.  It’s also stupid.  You have an incoming president-elect with approval numbers in the upper ionosphere, promoting a popular idea that would put people back to work, and you decide that this is your Little Bighorn. There is no political way to win this from that position. If it doesn’t pass, you’ll have won the battle but lost the war, as the Republican Obstructionist brand takes hold. If it does pass, you’ll have lost anyway and will be seen as utterly ineffective. Just from a political standpoint it seems like McConnell should be supporting anything Obama says on the economy right now.

And, on the other hand, if this is a position based on deeply held convictions, we will finally have the man’s soul laid bare, alas a few months late to vote him out of office.

(h/t Political Wire)

There’s a meme that’s been going around the government and the media for the last few months.  Some companies, they say, are too big to fail.  If these companies were to go under, declare bankruptcy, and fall off the face of the earth, the vacuum left in their absence would be too much for our economy to survive.

On the one hand, they’re right.  Companies like GM and Citigroup employ, directly and indirectly, millions of people across the world.  Losing them would drive this already sick economy into a death spiral.

But there’s something to think about in calling anything too big to fail.  Beyond abandoning the free market, which is supposedly God to many economic policy makers, it also points to the failure of deregulation.  These companies got so big because the anti-monopoly, regulatory, post-robber-baron financial world that was in control for most of the 20th Century got chucked out in the Reagan Revolution, and the trend continued through Clinton until Bush 2 got into power and totally screwed the pooch.

Yes, we should be bailing out the big companies right now.  But there have got to be strings included.  And one of those strings should be that no company be allowed to get where it is too big to fail.  Companies fail all the time, and new companies come along.  It’s financial natural selection.  That’s what commercial bankruptcy is for.  We shouldn’t get to a point where any company is too big to declare bankruptcy if that’s what is needed.

Just a couple weeks ago, GM was talking about buying Chrysler as a way to get both companies out of trouble.  That’s the opposite of what should happen.

The Dow is currently at 9233.41, a further drop of 213.70 from yesterday’s close.  It’s not looking like the Fed’s cutting of the benchmark rate by .5% is actually making much of a difference in the markets, except for possibly a slowing of the freefall.

That’s where the $700 Billion figure came from, according to Forbes:

In fact, some of the most basic details, including the $700 billion figure Treasury would use to buy up bad debt, are fuzzy.

“It’s not based on any particular data point,” a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. “We just wanted to choose a really large number.”

So, who has confidence in Hank Paulson right now?

(h/t OpenLeft)

Stoller at Open Left has a good listing of on-the-record statements from a number of people running to be part of Congress.

Many of us on the left (and those on the right who haven’t had their heads up their asses) have been talking about the economic downturn and the numerous facets that it has had.  The housing downturn that foreshadowed the mortgage crisis (that we’ve been talking about for over a year now), the markets falling to pieces, the collapse of Bear Stearns, and now Freddie, Fannie, Lehman and AIG.  Smaller banks have been failing, too, though not getting the attention that these ginormous businesses have.

And so here we are, on the edge of handing a $700 billion blank check to Hank Paulson to give to all his investment bank CEO chums.  Paulson, remember, was CEO of Goldman Sachs.  He’s hardly a disinterested individual.

When Chairman Chris Cox of the SEC and Sec. Paulson approached the Congressional leadership this week, hat in hand, it’s interesting that the Congress gave them the time of day.  After all, it’s under Paulson’s watch at Treasury that the investment markets, after gorging themselves silly on sub-prime mortgages, started to lose money hand over fist until there was no more money to lose.  Bear gone in a fire sale to JP Morgan, ML gone to Bank of America, Lehman without even that much of a chance, and billions of dollars in bail outs to Fannie, Freddie and AIG.  Hank Paulson needs to pay us back for this one.

But instead, what he requested was a $700 billion tab that he could run up to keep the markets afloat, with no oversight and no accountability.  Yeah, that sounds like a great idea.

Thankfully it looks like some members of Congress are as unhappy about the idea as I am.

Sometimes, I wonder if the editors of the Washington Post are trying to make the case that Republicans are woefully out of touch by publishing their OpEds unedited.  Then again, that may be giving them too much credit.

Take Donald Luskin’s piece from yesterday.  Published on the same day that Lehman Brothers tanked and Merrill Lynch sold itself at a bargain to Bank of America, it’s an amazing piece of wankery even outside of the latest context.

Things today just aren’t that bad. Sure, there are trouble spots in the economy, as the government takeover of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and jitters about Wall Street firm Lehman Brothers, amply demonstrate. And unemployment figures are up a bit, too. None of this, however, is cause for depression — or exaggerated Depression comparisons.

What follows this is some of the worst selective statistics quoting ever printed in a major newspaper. Luskin sums up:

Whatever the political outcome this year, hopefully this will prove to be yet another instance of that iron law of economics and markets: The sentiment of the majority is always wrong at key turning points. And the majority is plenty pessimistic right now. That suggests that we’re on the brink not of recession, but of accelerating prosperity.

Of course, Luskin fails to take into account one major statistic, but that’s because it make the rest of his argument fall to pieces.  That is that real wages, that is, wages adjusted for inflation, have been falling ever since 2001.  I wonder if that might have something to do with the “sentiment of the majority”, the defaulting on predatory loans, and the rest of the dominos that lead to today?

Senior officials from the Bush administration and the Federal Reserve on Friday called in top executives of Fannie Maeand Freddie Mac, the mortgage finance giants, and told them that the government was preparing to place the two companies under federal control, officials and company executives briefed on the discussions said.

This from NYT.

Five years ago today was my last day at RCN.  The call center I was working at closed, leaving 350 people without a job.  It was one of, at that point, three million jobs lost since Bush took office.

Strange then, that the AP brings us this nugget:

The nation’s unemployment rate zoomed to a five-year high of 6.1 percent in August as employers slashed 84,000 jobs, dramatic proof of the mounting damage a deeply troubled economy is inflicting on workers and businesses alike.

Five years.  And we’re back to where we were back then.

As on 12 noon today, that’s what the US Dollar is worth in Canadian Dollars. XE.com has the bad news.

At this point, Canada may want to build a wall to keep the illegal American aliens from coming over and stealing jobs from hard working Canadians.