….. or he’s running again for something.

Did he even watch the SOTU?

Who said globalism isn’t great?

The San Francisco bay bridge rebuild project was off shored to China, a country known (we need a sarcasm font) for it’s high quality building practices.

The bridge is arriving in pieces aboard specially built ships, 15 months late due to poorly translated plans, low grade steel and prison labor quality construction; and being constructed like a giant lego set in the sky.

The job was out sourced to China rather than built in the US to save roughly $6.3 billion in costs, a 100% increase…. never mind that the $6.3 billion saved would have been returned into the US… and San Fransisco economy instead of joining the rest of the flow of our wealth to China.

With any luck, we’ve financed the project with bonds sold to the Chinese so we can pay interest on the bridge as well so they eventually also get the $6.3 billion we saved.

For those three of you who haven’t heard, Toyota has issued a massive recall over a possible sudden acceleration issue that infects the top eight selling models in their lineup. This has started the tongue and keyboards wagging in the automotive press with some rather interesting commentary.

Jake Fisher, and automotive engineer at Consumer Reports stated in an interview to Automotive News that “”Toyota is trying very hard to do the right thing and being bold and having large recalls to portray the fact that they are willing to stop at nothing and spare no expense so nobody gets hurt in their vehicles.” and “Toyota has built this reputation on quality and reliability and safety and being a practical choice.”

Jake, Toyota “trying very hard to do the right thing” would have been addressing the issue when they allegedly knew about it as early as 2004. Having massive recalled 6 years after the problem began surfacing and after multiple people have lost their lives isn’t “trying very hard to do the right thing”

Also, doing a recall and stopping production when you know you are legally required to do so is not the same as doing so voluntarily.

One last thing Consumer Reports, Toyota didn’t build their reputation for quality, you built Toyota’s reputation for quality. Toyota has been having quality issues for years with sludging engines, failing transmissions, exploding camshafts, premature rusting, wheels falling off, and cracking frames, all the while resisting responsibility and blaming consumers. All this time you’ve given them passes for these issues and only jump on the reality train once Toyotas started killing people.

Toyota doesn’t have the reputation for quality you proclaim with anyone who reads just about any publication other than Consumer Reports.

Ford Motor Company, the only American auto manufacturer to not go through the pain of bankruptcy and government loans, posted a net profit for 2009 of $2.7 billion.

“We’re going to be profitable in 2010,” said CFO Lewis Booth, issuing the automaker’s first forecast for the year. Three months ago, Ford changed its 2011 outlook to “solidly profitable” from “break-even or better.”

Rush Limbaugh says there is nothing wrong with his heart. Attempts at locating, however, have failed.

General Motors posted a huge jump in it’s sales in China, up 66.9%, increasing it’s China market share to 13.4%.

Domestic sales by Shanghai GM rose 63.3 percent to 727,620 units in 2009.  The passenger car joint venture was once again led by its original brand, Buick, which experienced sales growth of 59.6 percent year on year to 447,011 units.  The Excelle, which sold 241,109 units, remained the brand’s bestseller for the sixth consecutive year.  Further contributing to the resurgence of Buick in China were the New Regal, which generated sales of 79,930 units, and the new LaCROSSE, which generated sales of 43,429 units in just six months on the market.

Chevrolet sales in China likewise experienced strong growth, with 332,774 units sold – an increase of 67.1 percent from 2008.  The Cruze, GM’s new global compact car, enjoyed great success in China, with sales of 92,190 units despite being on the market only nine months.  In addition, the Lova had sales of 118,935 units.

In 2009, SAIC-GM-Wuling became the first automaker in China to sell more than 1 million vehicles in a year, increasing its domestic sales by 63.9 percent to 1,061,213 units.  With sales of 596,630 units, the Wuling Sunshine set a Chinese industry record for annual sales by a single model.

FAW-GM sold 34,510 light commercial vehicles in the four months after its establishment in August 2009 and began construction of a new assembly plant in Ha’erbin.

GM China Sales jump to all time high

We’re in this mess because for the past 30 years we’ve gone to China to finance loans on our Japanese cars used to haul home Korean made products that you have to call India to get tech support for. – Me

Please pardon me as I settle the blog into it’s new home. I will be updating MUCH more frequently now. The old URL http://theautoeconomy.blogspot.com/ will continue to function indefinitely but our new URL is http://www.theautoeconomy.com/

Update: Ok apparently Wordpress didn’t import my post from blogger very cleanly so I’m going to have to go back and update all the formatting on them. They didn’t look like that originally…. promise.

The turmoil happening right now is the explosive unwinding of a business model that cannot be sustained by oil. AIG, bad mortgages, high unemployment, bank failures are not the causes of the unwinding, but the symptoms.

The Saudis, the Russians, the Venezuelans, the Mexicans all have falling output of oil. We have no alternative infrastructure in sight. Energy prices are down right now because factories are idle and not shipping anything. Energy prices are not going to stay down. This is the festering cancer waiting to come out of remission just as soon as the economy starts to turn around.

As a kid I had a favorite National Geographic betamax tape called Love those Trains that I would watch over and over. In part of the story, they follow a box car of lettuce that is picked in Southern California and finally delivered to a PTA luncheon in Boston. While I loved watching the trains, even as a kid I thought it was rather silly to ship lettuce from California to Boston. Even if Massachusetts couldn’t grow their own lettuce, I was sitting in the Garden State of New Jersey…. surely we, or some other close-to-Boston state, could produce enough lettuce to be able to supply Boston with salad instead of it coming from California.

We’re going to be forced to move to a more locally produced model of consumption. This will be a permanent change unless we develop and deploy an alternative fuel right now.

How could they think this was sustainable?

via Council on Foriegn Relations

edit: updating formating.