“Nobody wants” is an exaggeration, but a somewhat understandable one, given the falling share of U.S. non-fleet market. It is kind of hard to match this with their foreign market share results, at least with the data I have. Are their cars better suited to the customer in foreign markets? Or is it a case of GM competing against a different set of competitors in those markets, and therefore looking relatively better? I would guess at the latter.

Cherry-picking whether to present the raw number or a ratio (percentage, etc.) is the number one way to lie with statistics. To put something like competitive posture in perspective, you need a ratio and a time series, and if the number of distribution points are changing, you need to adjust for that, too. A gross customer count isn’t a meaningful statistic when you’re looking at whether a company is selling a good product! Why do you think retail companies use trends in same-store sales as a metric? When you look at GM’s share of the domestic non-fleet market over time, you get a better idea of how well-liked their product is, relatively speaking, than you do from a customer count.

Yes, the point was made, somebody likes GM’s vehicles, because they have managed to sell a few million (even after you account for fleet customers and those who buy GM without comparison shopping) in open competition. But overall, the mass of customers increasingly find GM vehicles in the U.S. to be inferior to those of competitors.

Quit Shooting Segments in Detroit

Look y’all, there’s a reason they set Robo-Cop in Detroit, and it ain’t because they thought Michigan had the “upper hand” in robotic technology R&D, if you get my drift. How little has changed (or has it gotten worse) in two decades.

Interviews with (soon-to-be-former) Auto Workers

So he’s scared. What’s he gonna do? He’s gonna call his creditors and tell them he will be missing payments.

Thought about MOVING? They’re still making cars in the U.S., in places like Greensburg IN, Vance AL, West Point GA, and Smyrna TN. For the record, that’s Honda, Mercedes, Kia, and Nissan, just off the top of my head. Hell, Honda has like half-a-dozen assembly plants here, Mercedes has others in the Carolinas, and Kia is just getting a foothold. Plus, I think you’ll like the weather better where they’re still making cars in the U.S., since most of those locations are in the South.

Thing is, previous rounds of protectionista measures for the domestic auto(loan)makers encouraged the “foreign” automakers to plant some of their plants on U.S. soil. Funny how well that worked out, isn’t it? Don’t forget NAFTA, if you want to learn some Spanish or maybe French, you might find a job assembling cars south or north of the border.

Smart people who want jobs, move where those jobs are. Reminds me of the old joke about starving Ethiopians, “Hey, we’ll make ONE TRIP and MOVE YOU WHERE THE FOOD IS!” I personally know folks in my profession that have moved from Mexico City to HOTlanta to Seattle to Plantation, or to North Carolina, or to the Adirondacks, or from Columbia to HOTlanta, or Cleveland to Jacksonville, etc., because of the job prospects. It’s not that big a deal. Decide if you want to be a welfare case in your current city, or a working, employed person in your industry somewhere else. It’s YOUR decision.

BTW, thought about changing careers?

They bought a bank, just in order to get bailed out.

In some bizarre way, this multi-national, multi-billion-dollar insurer can buy some tiny, eleven-branch-having, single state bank off of the pink sheets, and then apply to be considered a “savings and loan.”

Thus, a $10 million dollar purchase makes HIG eligible for potentially $3.4 billion in new capital from the TARP bailout plan.

I don’t know whether to be impressed that HIG management is that devious, sickened that they’ll probably get away with it and be rescued by this move, or reassured that my initial take on their position, a.k.a. “imminent FAIL,” was justified. After all, a move this desperate is pretty much confirmation that they were destined for the dustbin without the TARP. Now, of course, since their stock price had become an option on the company’s survival, one can possibly expect it to go up from here (or fluctuate based solely on TARP speculation, rather than fluctuating on speculation about the company fundamentals).

If we could only find enough recently-delisted, penny-stock pink sheet banks, we could save a whole bunch of troubled companies!

A humble suggestion to Ford (F) and General Motors (GM): buy a bank. The smaller the better.

Like that piece of the rock? It’s Mother’s Finest!

Early voting is a strengthening trend this decade; more and more states are allowing it and it will probably expand next cycle. This year, and probably in most years, early voting will favor Democrats. Part of what Florida (and other states with GOP Secretaries of State) did in prior elections was manipulate the vote through creative schemes that don’t really touch the vote per se. Things like, where do we place those “mandatory insurance checkpoints,” or how many machines per voter does each district get, etc. In most years, even barring direct discriminatory action, the machines/voter equation will always work against the poor voter (and hence the Democrat vote). Poor people relying on buses aren’t as likely to wait in a long line or have a job that allows them time off for voting, and poor neighborhoods aren’t likely to attract the attention of a high machine/voter ratio, pretty much ensuring they’ll have longer lines to wait in. The flip side of early voting? In a close race, the “early vote” could be used to explain discrepancies between the exit polls and the computer-counted votes. Just saying.

GDP initial figures out soon. If I were betting, I would take the over. Just saying. Lots of the fears are overblown, like the credit crunch and the Argentine debt crisis.

Karen De Coster talks about people being “round pegs” and choosing the easy, crowd favorite, thoughtless items for their protests. Of course! It’s the path of least resistance, and the human desire to follow the path of least resistance is part of the reason why corporate boards love share repurchases. They’re EASY. No thought required.

Nice discussion here about the C-S index and its flaws. Old news to my readers. It’s heartening that at least some analysts are digging a little deeper into the construction of the indices and how those impact the data result. While they did talk about the moving average technique and the geographical limitations, I wonder, did they talk about the weighting algorithms for the different indices? Or the ability to trade futures contracts on the C-S index, which automatically makes it more popular with the financial media and more generally acknowledged than the OFHEO index? The C-S index has some things going for it - other than accuracy - that make it the predominant housing index in the country. But similarly to the US Dollar Index, which is NOT trade-weighted, the C-S index has less to do with “the economy” than its proponents believe it does. Both house price indices have flaws. In my mind, the best index would have the OFHEO index’s geographical range and index construction and weighting methodology, with the C-S index’s inclusion of data from all price ranges, but that index doesn’t exist. In my mind, the OFHEO index is closer to the truth, but the truth is probably, usually, somewhere between the two indices.

Tomorrow on MarketThoughts I will be revisiting a six-month old post on current market volatility. Not quite THE.WORST.MONTH.EVER. But pretty darn near. Not much electronic trading going on, last time the market was this volatile.

Everyone wants to talk about earnings. The BIG infoporn idiot stat is to look at S&P 500 earnings without the financials, or without the energy sector, and leave it at that. That’s kind of idiotic. I expect more from y’all. Well, from some of y’all. If you look at the index earnings estimates (XLS format) you’ll see that 6 of the 10 sectors will be up from 3Q 2007, and if you exclude BOTH energy and the financials, then 5 of 8 sectors will be up from this quarter last year, and the weighted percentage (PDF format, use this document to do the sector weighting) is healthy earnings growth for those 8 sectors combined. If you look at year over year, then 7 of the 10 (and 6 of the trimmed 8, excluding energy and the financials) are showing growth, as is the trimmed index as a whole. Not just “growth” but pretty decent darn growth. DON’T BELIEVE ME! Do the work yourself and see! That kind of earnings growth ain’t consistent with a “global great depression.”

It’s been mentioned by others that the market crash of 2008 has pretty much killed plans to “privatize Social Security” (notwithstanding that there was nothing PRIVATE about those plans). What HASN’T been mentioned is that the market crash of 2008 has probably PROLONGED the life of that failed, FUBARed Ponzi scheme. After all, it’s delayed a whole lot of retirements … that last one was a Wifeykins random.