Toyota

Down 20% from September 2006. Toyota and Honda got brutally slammed. But don't blame post-earthquake inventory shortages. They have been resolved. It's a shift in the market.

All you need to read.

All you need to read. (a little late today)

• Euro Crisis Makes Fed Lender of Only Resort as Funding Dries Up (Bloomberg)
• Germany Slams 'Stupid' US Plans to Boost EU Rescue Fund (Telegraph)
• US Inflation Expectations Lowest for a Year (FT)
• Chinese Banks Raise Cash to Cushion Against Bad Debts (WSJ)
• Banks Wary of Financing Big Projects (FT)
• German Ruling Coalition Faces Tricky Bailout Vote (WSJ)
• Health Insurance Costs Deal Blow to Obama (FT)
• China Warns Asia Not to Hide Behind U.S. Military (Bloomberg)
• Japan Ruling Party Proposes $120B Tax Increase (Bloomberg)

• Yuan ‘Fully Convertible’ in 5 Years: Adviser (Bloomberg)
• ‘Barrier’ Around Greece Needed: Merkel (Bloomberg)
• US banks face losses on loan commitments (FT)
• Pentagon may cap executive pay reimbursement at $694,000 (WaPo)
• Debt talks fail to agree solution (FT)
• Europe Split Threatens Rescue Plan (WSJ)
• US tax authorities target bank deals (FT)
• Under fire, Europe works to bolster debt crisis fund (Reuters)
• Asia wooing Japanese companies (WaPo)
• Credible India’ drive to woo investors (FT)

And for today's fake press du jour release we go to Marketwatch which amusingly carries the following headline/story, which has since been rebroadcast by Bloomberg and other wire services:

• 700,000,000 Million Cars and Light Trucks Need Recalling

That's.... 700 trillion!?

Jim Rogers was on CNBC earlier, discussing the recent intervention by the SNB and the overnight plunge in Europe, in the process generating yet another amusing episode of market "non-cheerleader" Bob Pisani attempting spin the global economic collapse in a favorable light on not one, not two but on three separate occasions, and being soundly rejected by the far more, informed shall we say, Rogers. Specifically, to Pisani's repeated attempt to get Rogers to admit the uber-secret of which stocks he is long (CNBC Ponzi playbook 101), the former Quantumanite responds that not only is he not long anything, he is mostly short stocks and very much long commodities for two simpler reasons: "if the world economy gets better i'm going to make money in commodities because of shortages that are developing. Especially in agriculture and precious metals. If the world economy doesn't get better, Bob, you're not going to make any money in Toyota or IBM but you might make money in commodities because they're going to print more money. It's the wrong thing to do but they will print money. Bernanke is already printing money again. You have to protect yourself. I'm short stocks but i don't expect the world economy to get better. Not much better anyway, if it does and I am long commodities as a protection." And on some other topic like the Chairsatan, "Bernanke has been lying to us again", on the SNB intervention attempt: "This is a terrible mistake" and on what should happen to Europe: " It would be good for the world, though, if they let people go bankrupt."

Americans pay 43 cents in taxes out of the $3.70 they pay at the pump for a gallon of gasoline. A driver in the UK is paying $4 per gallon in taxes out of the $9 per gallon cost. Gasoline costs between $8 and $9 per gallon across Europe today. The extreme level of gas taxes certainly reduces car sizes, consumption and traffic. Too bad the mad socialists across Europe spent the taxes on expanding their welfare states and promising even more to their populations. Maybe a $6 per gallon tax will do the trick. Forcing Americans to drive less by doubling the gas tax is a quaint idea, but it is too late in the game. Europe is still made up of small towns and cities with the populations still fairly consolidated. Biking, walking and small rail travel is easy and feasible. The sprawling suburban enclaves that proliferate across the American countryside, dotted by thousands of malls and McMansion communities, accessible only by automobiles, make it impossible to implement a rational energy efficient model for moving forward. We cannot reverse 60 years of irrationality. Even without higher gas taxes, the price of gasoline will move relentlessly higher due to the stealth tax of currency debasement.

The entire premise of the engineering mindset is that problems can be broken down to a small set of quantifiable inputs, processes and outputs. This works fine when measuring and controlling water flow, flow of electrons, and other linear systems, but it is catastrophically mis-applied when Know-It-Alls besotted by their success in extremely limited linear systems attempt to "solve" non-linear problem-sets with linear "solutions." Case in point: war is highly non-linear. The "Whiz Kids" at the Pentagon did not even understand the problem-set, or the nature of war; how could their simplistic, Know-It-All "solutions" possibly work in the real world? Most of our problem-sets are non-linear, and are thus inaccessible to engineered solutions. If we consider the stock market a problem-set, then shouldn't it be possible to engineer 11 good trades in a row? After all, the data is all there for the taking. If a whiz kid could engineer 11 trades that doubled the capital invested--not that impossible when trading futures contracts or options--then in 11 iterations a mere $500 blossoms into $1 million. So go ahead and engineer a "solution" to the stock market "problem" which yields 11 good trades in a row. The problem is that the market--and most of life--is non-linear, and "solutions" cannot be conjured out of simplistic linear models and inputs which cannot be quantified except with a highly illusory accuracy.

• Bernanke to aid recovery with gradual boost in dosage (Reuters)
• China factory output cools in August: HSBC (Reuters)
• German court to rule on Sept 7 on euro, Greek bailouts (Reuters)
• European Banks Must Pay Up to Borrow $100B (Bloomberg)
• A ‘no-growth’ boom will follow 2012 global crash (Market Watch)
• Merkel and Sarkozy Relationship Betrays Europe Crisis (Bloomberg)
• White House to Scale Back Regulations on Businesses (WSJ)

Relevant News by www.thetrader.se

Relevant news by www.thetrader.se

One of the most entertaining if absolutely flawed fables we have heard over the past several months is that Japan is currently undergoing some mythical V-shaped recovery, based on some even more mythical surge in car production and sales. Courtesy of a thing called "facts", summarized by Reuters, we can now effectively ignore this growth strawman for good. "New vehicle sales in Japan fell by a record in July, battered by production disruptions from the March 11 earthquake, while South Korean rivals extended their winning streak to report strong global sales. Sales of new vehicles, excluding 660cc minicars, in Japan fell 27.6 percent to 241,472 vehicles, with Toyota Motor Corp leading the decline. "Looking at the trend from April onwards, the situation hasn't changed much from June," said Michiro Saito, general manager at the Japan Automobile Dealers Association. "Vehicle supply won't return right away and we're looking forward to the production recovery at automakers from around September." Toyota's sales fell 37 percent, while Honda Motor Co's dropped 33.2 percent. Nissan Motor Co , which has been less impacted by the March earthquake and tsunami, fared better with a 17.6 percent fall." Incidentally, it is time to get an update of our own nationalized, taxpayer-subsidized union blackhole: Government Motors and specifically its record channel stuffing shennanigans due out shortly.

By www.thetrader.se

All you need to know by www.thetrader.se