Ford Motor Company Expects Sharp Sales Drop Industry-Wide...

    and they are putting out numbers like a 35% sales drop in December compared to last year. That is a lot of cars either not being made or still sitting on dealer lots. ford also does not expect a sales turnaround for the first quarter this year.

    Ford , the No. 2 U.S. automaker, expects that full-year sales of light vehicles in the world's largest market will drop to near 13.2 million for 2008, down from near 16.2 million in 2007, Ford's chief sales analyst George Pipas said on Friday.

Major automakers are set to release December and full-year 2008 sales data on Monday. Analysts have said they see December light-vehicle sales slipping below the 10.2 million unit sales rate recorded a month earlier.            News Daily

     Is this not a fucked-up deal, or what? With all of these vehicles sitting on dealers lots, we should be able to get a killer deal on a car purchase, with some very good credit terms. You and I should be able to name our price on a new set of wheels. But noooooo...

   Thanks to an un-regulated Wall Street along with a housing bubble going bust, we can't afford to buy the damned cars. For that matter, many of us can't afford to buy to much of anything else either!

   Those of you so-called conservatives who have pushed the idea of deregulation and less government since the Reagan years, I hope that you are happy. To those Democrats who let this shit come into being by being cowards and holding your mouths shut while the Republicans swindled and robbed the middle class and the poorer among us, I say " fuck you".

   Speaking of tight credit and auto's, just a few days ago, GM and GMAC  launched a new program to get buyers into their showrooms to buy a vehicle.

   GMAC  modified its credit criteria so that it could lend to a wider range of potential customers, two-and-a-half months after significantly curbing lending.

Meanwhile, GM is offering zero-percent financing on several vehicles, and rates no higher than 5.9 percent on more than three dozen 2008 and 2009 models. The offer expires on January 5. Many eligible vehicles also carry cash discounts of $500 to $4,250.

The changes came a day after the U.S. Treasury Department agreed to take a $5 billion stake in GMAC, and lend GM as much as $1 billion to support GMAC, in an effort to help ensure that both survive.

   My job has been cut back on work hours and I'm losing money. Where the fuck is my bailout?

Technorati Tags: Big 3 Automakers,Ford Motor Company,GM,GMAC,Economy,Credit,Automakers,Bailout

Financial Markets For 2008

   The financial  markets couldn't bid farewell to 2008 fast enough after suffering some of the biggest losses ever in modern time.

  Standard & Poor's 500 suffered its biggest losses since 1937, losing 38.5%.

   The Dow Jones Industrial Average?  It didn't do much better either, suffering a 33.8% drop in 2008. That was the worst drop for the DJIA since 1931.

    The Nasdaq composite index was the worst performing of all 3 indexes, dropping 40.5%.

    It was the S&P's third worst year, the second worst for the Dow and the worst ever for the Nasdaq.   

•Broad and biting. A vast majority, 1,316 or nearly 9 out of 10 stocks in the S&P 1500, lost value in 2008, according to data from S&P's Capital IQ. And on average, the losers are off 42.3%. Meanwhile, 469 members of the S&P 500 fell last year.

•Jarring volatility. The market posted its best percentage day, on Oct. 13, as well as five of its worst, based on the DJ Wilshire 5000 index, which is one of the broadest measures of the U.S. market. And $6.9 trillion in market value was wiped out.     USAToday

   Investors and most brokers are hoping that 2009 is better for them, obviously. But that ain't going to happen without some added deregulation to Wall Street, for starters.

Technorati Tags: Wall Street,2008,Stocks,DJIA,Standard & Poor's 500,Nasdaq,Investors,Economy,Politics