Detroit is meaningless compared to Wall Street because the addiction to money is some orders of magnitude bigger compared to cars. Nobody is interested in either industry but the financial industry is by nature the champion of all free riders, just add that cars are a domestic problem and money an international confidence game, resulting in the money addiction making them invincible.
???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????
I can see what detroit produces… real goods, a vehicle, albeit, not exactly what the market wants,
but a product that I can actually use it to get from point A to Point B.
But to spend trillions on financial derivatives that gives absolutely no benefit to
an avg joe like me, is class warfare.

I agree. Without taking sides in an ideological way, I find this to be sound investment thinking. I am certainly a political person but I put that aside when I am making investment decisions.

They are going to do political stuff that may or may not be logical or make economic sense and we may not agree with any of it. But we have to play the ball as it is kicked to us, no matter where it is.

I agree completely with Stuart about fraud at AIG. They could be the first firm in history to be bailed out purely because of their CDS exposure and all go to jail at the same time.

No matter what, Big Auto is going down on Obama’s watch. Its advocates will suffer more for this $15 billion *bailout* than others who had a hand in the several hundred billion dollar handout to Wall Street.

They will suffer more because the lumpen masses at least understand cars.

Capitalism Must have slaves – doesn’t it?

Stop turning this into a class warfare: blue collar vs white collar. Who says white collar worker wanted or approved this $700 bil wall street bailout bullshit? Many of mine office coworkers hates bailouts period. Bailouts DOESN’T allow bad business to fail and that will only contribute to a bigger problem into the near future.

The $15 bil or 34 bil or $700 bil would have been better spent in helping US citizens adapt/adjust to the credit problems, retrain and find jobs in different industries. I hate this comparison of Hoover done nothing to help prevent or relief 1st Great Depression in 1929 and that Roosevelt did in 1932… yet we as a nation didn’t fully recover until 1942 and got involved in WW2 where manufacturing jobs were created.

I hate this message we are teaching the next generation, “boy and girls, if you screwed up, you can go hide in big daddy’s pocket”. Just remember, we are not bailing out anyone here but burying ourselves deeper into national debt. You may not be paying price now but to pass that burden to the our kids would be the most selfish things we as a nation can possibly do.

In my opinion the big three are where they are because they made crappy cars and the Japanese were able to sell higher quality cars for higher prices. They made poor technical decisions and they made poor economical decisions.

When was the last time GM actually made money consistently? 2005: -10.6B, 2006: -2B, 2007: -39B . SUVs were still selling like hot cakes in 2005. There were some accounting issues in 2000-2004 and a quick search can’t even get me the numbers as the results were restated.

I think these companies need to be shaken up big time. They need to find a new way of running their business that is more sustainable. I guess that applies to the entire economy. The more I think about this the more I realize there is just something fundamentally wrong with the current economical model of free markets and globalization somehow steered by central banks and credit. It just seems like one big pyramid scheme.