European Auto Makers Seek $50 Billion Bailout.
Guess they’re lacking in innovation and management talent, but twice as bad as detroit.
http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/blog/europeinsight/archives/2008/11/push_for_europe.html?campaign_id=europe_related
This is a credit crisis, banking collapse and rapidly heading for a depression. Detroit had a plan to get them thru till early 2011, but the world collapsed on them and wiped out 2 years of the plan because of 50% drops in sales and a failed credit system.
Complain all you want about bailouts, but detroit had a plan, it didn’t take into account a collapse of the financial system. The guys who caused this on wall street, in the city and the rest of the financial world got bail outs for their failed businesses, now others need help to handle the fallout. Now the world wants to blame detroit’s problems on their own bad planning.
I judge what should be done by looking at the lack of action taken by the US government in 1929-1933 and Japanese government who worried about inflation in after 1989, rather than the deflation that followed. So, far we are failing to deliver the money that was already agreed upon. We’re heading for a deflationary collapse and high unemployment. I say let’s risk keeping wobbly industries running for a few years for the sake of stability if nothing else. Remember our competitors are running up debt and starting to collapse just like us, maybe worse (look at russia right now).
BTW – The University of Chicago is the home of “free market economics”, Milton Friedman and the folks who view human death as just another economic factor and no more negative than any another cost. In short, you won’t be finding very much from the U of Chicago influencing the Obama Team. Obama’s economic team are East Coast Liberal economists from Harvard, MIT, Hopkins, etc that ran things under clinton.