From James Hamilton….

I was running out of vocabulary last month to describe just how bad October was for the domestic automakers. But whatever you want to say about October, November was significantly worse.

When I first saw the figure for November sales of cars manufactured in North America– 236,000 units– I thought maybe somebody had mistyped the first digit. Even 336,000 would have been a very bad month. But 236,000 is 17% below the dreadful October figure and 40% below the number sold in November of 2007.

From Wall Street Journal….

The Treasury Department is considering a plan to revitalize the U.S. home market that would push down mortgage rates for home loans, according to people familiar with the matter.

The plan, which is in the development stage, would temporarily use the clout of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to encourage banks to lend at rates as low as 4.5%, more than a full percentage point lower than prevailing rates for a standard 30-year fixed-rate mortgage.

Government officials are under pressure to address falling housing prices and mounting foreclosures, which underpin the current financial crisis. Treasury has struggled for months to come up with a plan that would ease the strains on borrowers without appearing to bail out homeowners and lenders.

Why did they arbitrarily choose to make rates a full percentage point lower? As long as we are printing money, why don’t we drop rates all the way down to 1%? After all, its not like using low rates to encourage people to buy houses has ever caused problems in the entire history of the America. And housing prices always go up.

From Macro Man…

As always, however, large government actions carry unintended consequences. While lower long-term rates may be seen as a boon to spending, they also substantially increase the net present value of pension fund liabilities. Coming at a time when declining asset performance has left a hole in pension funds’ balance sheets, lower long term rates make the asset-liability mismatch even worse. Among those funds most adversely affected include, quelle surprise, the defined-benefit plans of the Big 3, who themselves are lobbying for fresh government bailouts.

This is even more true if the effect of all this money printing is inflationary.

From the Wall Street Journal….

As part of a renewed bid to win backing for a government bail out, GM requested a total of $18 billion in federal loans — $6 billion more than it said it would a few weeks ago — and added it needs an immediate injection of $4 billion to stay afloat until the end of the year.

The urgency of GM’s request stirred up new worries that GM may have to file for bankruptcy protection. In Detroit on Tuesday, top officials from the United Auto Workers union said at a meeting that GM could be forced into a Chapter 11 filing before Christmas if the auto maker fails to get government funding in the coming days, people familiar with the matter said Tuesday.

From the Associated Press…..

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a fiscal emergency Monday and called lawmakers into a special session to address California’s $11.2 billion deficit.

The state’s revenue gap is expected to hit $28 billion over the next 19 months without bold action. The emergency declaration authorizes the governor and lawmakers to change the existing budget within the next 45 days.

Without quick action, the state is likely to run out of cash in February.

In a democracy, endless problems call for endless money.