Ten year bond broke below 4% yield, and oil is threatening to break $50 per barrel today.

bin Sultan was apparently unable to deliver on his promised pre-election oil price discount for Dubya, and the bond market is predicting slow or stagnant economic growth.

This Reuters article appeared in Automotive News as part of its Paris Auto Show coverage:

Toyota Motor Corp. aims to double sales of its Lexus luxury models in Europe over the next several years by adding more models and cultivating an image of top quality and fuel efficiency that it enjoys in the United States, a top official said on Thursday.

"We need more competitive products for the Lexus brand in Europe," Tadashi Arashima, chief executive officer of Toyota Motor Marketing Europe (TMME) told Reuters in an interview at the sidelines of the Paris motor show.

"But Europeans are already becoming more and more receptive to Lexus, and we will aim to double sales in a little more than two or three years," he said.

While the mass-volume Toyota brand has achieved record sales in Europe for the past seven straight years, sales in the Lexus line have been up and down, peaking in 2001 at 23,837 units.

Arashima said, however, that the introduction of the RX400h hybrid luxury sport utility vehicle next spring and a remodeling of the GS model should help boost Lexus sales next year in Europe -- home to most of the world's top luxury brands.

In a separate interview, Toyota Motor Europe's executive vice president, Takis Athanasopoulos, said demand for Lexus cars in had been lacklustre also due to the lack of the diesel option, which makes up about half of Europe's luxury car market.

"But by 2006, the diesel-powered Lexus will be introduced," he said, adding that should be a significant boost for the brand.

The world's second-biggest auto maker is also set to challenge the dominance of European luxury marques in its home market when it brings the Lexus brand to Japan next year.

The Lexus is currently sold in virtually every market outside of Japan.

Toyota makes Lexi? Damn, my ignorance is astounding.

No wonder that's such a good car.

Right.  Toyota sets the standard.  When Lexus, Infiniti, and Acura first came out in the US they overwhelmed the luxury car market, just about.  It's all about quality.

Hard to sell Japanese cars in some European countries though.  A car that costs $35,000 here will be over $45,000 in GB. 

OTOH, a Mercedes that is expensive here is almost a commodity on the continent.  I saw many large Mercedes taxis.

Go as a private individual and price the equivalent Merc in Germany and then price it in the US, even subtracting the shipping cost and see what you get.

Them 'security moms" may whine about gas prices but they still want  that 4,000 lb "safety steel package" around them.

Yeah, if only they would stop trying to drive them like sports cars.  And stop tailgating my little compact.

Don't I know.

If there's room ahead I and I can't shake the tailgater, I'll blast up to 100 MPH or so, then pull over in the right lane and slow down to let them pass.  If I do it at the wrong spot though , guess who gets the tickie.

Them 'security moms" may whine about gas prices but they still want  that 4,000 lb "safety steel package" around them.

What Economic Recovery?
    By James K. Galbraith
    Salon.com

    Friday 08 October 2004
The latest job figures show that Bush has bungled the economy as badly as he has Iraq.

    Only 95,000 payroll jobs were created in September, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Friday morning - a chilling number released hours before the second presidential debate. Of these jobs, only 59,000 were in the private sector. Manufacturing employment declined by 18,000 jobs. Only 103,000 payroll jobs have been created on average in the past three months. Only 1.7 million new jobs were created in the past year - Bush's best year, but worse than in any year under Clinton. We remain almost a million payroll jobs below where we stood on the day George Bush took office. In the household survey, 201,000 jobs were lost last month. Truly, Bush is President No Jobs.

    But the news does not merely confirm that grim narrative about Bush's presidential term. It also points to an ongoing reality. It's not just that job growth has been miserable in the past four years. It's that it continues to be miserable right now and has actually gotten worse since the spring. Job creation since June is 150,000 short of the minimum required to keep up with population growth. This isn't a "jobless recovery." It's jobless, yes. But is it a recovery?

    Sandra Pianalto, president of the Cleveland Federal Reserve Bank, typifies the view of the uncured optimists. Speaking Thursday, she offered two possibilities: "As the unemployment data arrives over the next several months, we may very well see the jobs numbers snap back if confidence in our economy is restored, economies around the world strengthen, and energy prices stabilize." And on the other hand? "But it may turn out that the process of job expansion will take more time ..."

    Ostrich! Take your head out of the sand! There is, let me humbly suggest, a third possibility. To see what it might be, let's review a little bit of the evidence from recent days.

  1. The GDP growth rate peaked a year ago. Since the first blush of excitement following the cakewalk to Baghdad, growth rates have been sliding almost all the way: 7.4, 4.2, 4.5, and 3.3 percent. And the second quarter of 2004 would have been below 3 percent, except for a large buildup in unsold inventory. That is leading to production cutbacks in the present quarter.
  2. Predictably, we now have an actual decline in new orders for manufactured goods in August. We have an even larger decline in new orders for durable manufactures. The growth of new home construction in the past three months, through August, is well below what it had been in the previous four. The issuance of new construction permits has fallen quite sharply. The purchasing managers' index has fallen two months running, and in four of the past six months.
  3. Personal income in each of the past three months grew at rates about half of those in each of the previous four. Auto sales declined in August, as did total retail sales. Chain store sales were up only 1.5 percent - their slowest monthly growth rate all year. New consumer credit declined in August, and consumer confidence has fallen two months in a row.
  4. Meanwhile the oil price is above $50, and there is no sign that it will come down soon. Interest rates are rising, for reasons that remain carefully obscured, but probably have to do with deep fears and hidden pressures over the dollar. And the direct spending by government, including state and local government - remains hobbled by large deficits and financial crisis.

    What then is the third possibility? It's that the burst of investment we got following the initial success of the Iraq invasion is petering out, with little to show and nothing coming online. It's that consumers, who supported the economy by spending and adding to debt all through the Bush years, are facing the inevitable and slowing down. It's that nowhere in the world do we see adequate growth to lift the U.S. economy out of the doldrums. And while oil prices may stabilize at $50 a barrel, does anyone believe the U.S. economy will do as well with $50 oil as we did when oil sold for $20 a barrel?

    As of now, the Federal Reserve is forecasting a 4 percent growth rate for 2005. The National Association for Business Economists, that advertisers' auxiliary, is chirping 3.7 percent. These are not very good growth numbers for an expansion that has never seen a sustained burst of strong growth. But they still imply the continuation of the trends in the first half of this year - especially for consumer spending and business investment. At the moment, given developments in the past three months, the smart money has to be betting against that.

    And, as Bloomberg News reported yesterday, the smart money is betting against it. A Business Council survey of 50 corporate chief executives revealed that they expect economic growth of only 2 percent next year - a further sharp deceleration compared with this year. Not a single leading businessman in the sample expected accelerating growth. Even more surprising, the bosses are bearish even though they expect oil prices to stabilize and their own profits to pick up. If they are wrong on those assumptions, well, Katie bar the door.

    Why are the bosses so downbeat? Part of the answer is that they are executives. Unlike business economists who work for them, they aren't paid to talk up the market. Another part of the answer is that these gentlemen are realistic. They know that Team Bush has no plan in place, and none in prospect, to support growth next year. Nor will Bush, if he wins the election, have any incentive to develop such a plan. We already know what Bush's economic priorities are, and strong growth isn't among them.

    And what if the voters throw out Bush in four weeks? Then it will be up to Kerry and Edwards to cope with the onrushing stagnation. While the false optimism surrounding Iraq will disappear with Bush and Cheney, false optimism on the economy has an institutional base, at the Federal Reserve and among the business economists. That's a problem still to be overcome.

    If Kerry and Edwards are smart - and after two debates does anyone doubt it? - they will bypass the ostrich colony and the hallelujah choir. Instead, they'll sit down with the real leaders of business and labor and get serious about the real situation and what must be done.

But Bushie said so. That's good enough for rabid Bushie fans, even unemployed ons.

What is unemployed ons ?

Seriously, I've been wondering how all this talk about how well the economy is doing meshes with the miserable stock market that's been charging back and forth across the same ground all year--between 10,000 and 10,300.

Where's the investor class putting its money that it's making such supposedly good returns?

An essay concerning the origins, nature, extent and morality of this destructive force in free market economies. Definitions. Paradoxes and omissions in Adam Smith's original theory permit - encourage - greed without restraint so that in a very large society over two centuries  it has become an undemocratic force creating  precipitous inequalities; divisions in this  society  now approach a kind of wealth apartheid, and our values are quite unlike Smith's:  this is an immensely wealthy society but it is not a humane society.  Wealth and poverty are connected, in fact recent sociological theory shows our institutions routinely design inequality in, but this connection is largely avoided in texts  and in the media, as is the notion that greed is a moral wrong. Problems created by greed cannot be solved by technology.  We are also distracted by already-outdated environmental rhetoric, arguments that scarcities and human suffering follow from abuse of our ecology. Rather, these scarcities are the result of what people do to people. This focus opens practical solutions.




Sign the tab in certain Midtown eateries and your neighbors’ eyes slide over. Is that a $48,000 Michel Perchin pen? What’s on your wrist – a $300,000 Breguet watch?

In Palm Springs and Bel Air, $100,000 twin-turbo Porsches and $225,000 Ferraris buzz the warm streets. In New York at an exclusive Morell & Company auction last May, a single magnum of Dom Perignon champagne was sold for $5,750. And there are the paintings of course - one evening at auction two Monets sold for $43 million (2). Hotel rooms, anyone, at $10,000 a night?  Estate agents in suburbs of Dallas and Palm Beach have advertised baronial homes for sale at over $40 million (3).

These are prices paid by the exceptionally wealthy, the folks who skim the pages of the Robb Report (average annual salary of subscribers: $1.2 million) in whose glossy pages are reviewed the best of everything. In a recent issue a southern plantation is advertised, "everybody's dream," at $8.5 million.

Robert Reich points out that the superrich live in a parallel universe to the rest of the country: much of the time we don’t see them because they live in walled estates, travel in private limousines and use different airports from the rest of us (4). There’s lots of them. There are now more than 200 billionaires. Some five percent of American households have assets over $1 million. And we’re back to levels of extravagant consumption not seen for 100 years (5).

By historical accounts this is a nation of persistent and resilient people with an unshakable mission: the pursuit of happiness. This idea of happiness is largely connected with wealth (and this connection has long philosophic roots). It is a nation of ambitious people with notions of unfettered future growth, a nation that celebrates abundance. There seems to be no reason anyone should be deprived of luxury, if he works hard. Indeed with this country’s aggregate wealth, there should be no reason anyone should ever go hungry or suffer.

People are going hungry in America. A Los Angeles survey found more than a quarter of low income residents, many working, are not getting enough food to meet basic nutritional needs. And 10% are experiencing hunger (6).

Estimates are that 3 out of 10 Americans will face poverty sometime in their lives (7).

Misery is a word seldom applied to the contemporary scene. Like wretchedness it seems antique, an Old World term. But many Americans live in cold, dank slums; many do not earn enough for shelter, many sleep outside. In America’s inner cities and at its lowest levels, under freeway bridges and in tubercular alleys, in stained and broken rooming houses and in torn-apart schools, misery exists and persists. All our largest cities contain neighborhoods where some people live day to day in apartments that could be mistaken for closets, some fearing to leave home on gang-terrorized streets, some sharing bus seats with people with drug-scarred arms. Every great metropolis has its skid row mired in fecal gutters, where whole blocks are awash in narcotics and violence, its inhabitants despised and flatly abandoned.

America is once again a nation of extremes.

more

http://www.g-r-e-e-d.com/GREED.htm

(snip)

Encouraged by low interest rates and rising home values, millions of Americans have been using their homes to pay off credit card bills. One-fourth of homeowners who refinanced their mortgages took out larger loans on their homes in order to pay off credit cards and other debts, according to a recent study by the Federal Reserve.

The maneuver is known as debt consolidation, and mortgage lenders are using national campaigns - from prime-time advertising to e-mail spam - to pitch it as a sound way to ease the sting of credit card debt, which averages $13,000 for people who don't pay off their balance each month, according to CardWeb.com. For many, probably a vast majority, it has been a boon. Experts say the device is a factor in a recent leveling off of credit card debt and a drop this year in personal bankruptcies.

But each year, tens of thousands of people - not just the poor - lose their homes after trying to cope with their debts this way, industry figures show, and their heart-rending tales are raising alarm among consumer advocates, federal regulators and some mortgage lending officials.

In Bluefield, W. Va., a retired coal miner, William Anderson, 80, and his wife, Kathleen, 79, owned their home of 45 years free and clear, but lost it in March after falling behind on a new $48,000 mortgage that they were persuaded to get in order to pay off their automobile loans.

Robert and Shirley McCall of Paris, Ill., were trying to pay off $7,720 in medical bills when they took out a new $22,000 mortgage on their house, but in failing to keep up with the larger mortgage payments, they were warned by their lender in August that they were nearing foreclosure.

In Macon, Ga., Melissa and Shawn Lynch are trying to salvage their home. In order to pay off credit card debts, they took out a second mortgage on the three-bedroom home they bought in 2001 for $71,000, but then were hit with medical bills on top of the new, larger mortgage payments. Three weeks ago, they sought help from a debt counselor and discovered that their house was at great risk. "We were young," said Ms. Lynch, 28, and the lender "smelled blood, really."

While not everyone affected is a poor credit risk, much of the booming business of debt consolidation focuses on such borrowers - what is known as the subprime market.

The industry, which has an estimated four million outstanding loans, has enabled many people with modest incomes to own their homes. But last year, more than 16 percent of subprime mortgages were delinquent or in foreclosure. More than 76,000 families with subprime mortgages tumbled into foreclosure in the first quarter of 2004, and an additional 47,000 in the second quarter.

While statistical evidence is piecemeal, the rush to pay off credit cards and other consumer debt by taking out bigger mortgages appears to be playing a growing role in this trouble.

(snip)

For bds, a long (and melodramatic) but interesting article.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/10/business...059&partner=AOL

Is this going to be the price of the consumer spending binge?

I personally jocked up in Symantec a little over a year ago.

I put a tidy sum in gold rubles some years ago.  That's a pretty good hedge.

You polish up your rubles; I'll polish up my remaining three words of schooldays Russian .... lookie out!

Kewl. Then you can come and read my rubles for me.

Money talks.

I can pronounce letters fine, just kinda don't know what many words mean.

You have a kindred spirit in the Whitehouse, then.

Money talks.

I can pronounce letters fine, just kinda don't know what many words mean.

These is the ones with picures of the Czar on them.  1897, as I remember.  I haven't looked at them fof a long time.

Kewl kewl. Those would be keepers I would think. I always have wondered how anyone in the US government decided to title certain positions "Czars." Wonderment!

Keepers for sure.  Cased sets of 3, untouched and with certification papers.  I keep them safe in a safe.

Yes Czar is a thought provoking word.  We had crime Czars like Al Capone, but now we have Drug Czars who pretend to stamp out crime.  Strange.

And a counter-terrorism czar, and an intelligence czar. When I think "czar,"  I think Nicholas II, not Peter the Great. And mostly I think defunct.

I heard the Russian Revolution started when they found out the Czar and the Tsar were the same person.

Makes sense.

I would have tried to boink one of them czarettes.