From the Washington Post…..

The United States would recover most of its planned $50 billion investment in General Motors within five years, according to a preliminary Treasury Department estimate that foresees the company, now on the brink of bankruptcy, rebounding over that time to become a strapping global competitor.

I wounder how GM will become a global company when it will probably not be able to sell cars in Europe for a long time. If you read the whole article, you will see that the US was so confident of GM ability to compete that they made the German’s swear that Opel would not be allowed to sell cars in the US. It seems to me that the EU would be well with in its rights to demand that GM not sell cars in Europe.

Also, if you read the article you will see that US government seems to be planing on pulling some (most?) of GM production in China back to the states. How well do you think that is going to go over in China and how much luck do you think GM is going to have exporting cars to Asia?

Nowadays, a 138 billion dollar drop in revenue seems kind of small.

How we can avoid bailing out California when we are giving GM 50 billion?

After all, think of all the mentally ill who will be put on the streets if we don’t bail out California.

A reminder that playing games with figure eventually catches ups to you.

An interesting discussion on credit cards and “freeloaders.”

The games they play with propane tank refills.

China starting to get excited. What they are afraid off. They have a lot of money on the line. This makes printing our way out of the problem a little tricky.

Speaking of tricky, this is increasing the problems that Social Security faces.

Then there is the odd nuclear weapons test just to put all of those problems in perspective.

How does Hezbollah’s involvement mean that Syria was not involved?

The fears of the market.

China driving up the price of commodities.

A good overview of Benjamin Netanyahu’s views on Iran. Nothing particularly new for those who have followed him however.

According to statistics, Germany is going down the rat hole almost three time faster then the US.

Conservatives in California get what they want, but they won’t like it. It has to happen, but if they think they are going to lay of prison guards without any ill effects they are dreaming. It is not like California’s prison system can handle the load as it is.