At first blush most people will probably be outraged China would buy a stake in GM. This is from the impending IPO (or initial public offering).
In a sign of the changing fortunes of the world's top two economies, China's biggest auto maker, SAIC Motor Corp., is negotiating to acquire a stake of about 1% in General Motors Co. worth about $500 million, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The U.S. auto maker also is prepared to sell more than $1 billion worth of shares to sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East and Asia. Combined, the sales would give foreign investors roughly 16% of the shares to be sold next week under an initial public offering of stock, and give them a stake of some 4% in the Detroit auto maker.
Pretty incredible huh? We bail out GM and now China buys a piece? That said, with the impending trade war and considering GM's sales and existing joint ventures in China this should come as no surprise.
Shame the government didn't do a better job of negotiating U.S. jobs in the bail out mix.
President Obama gave some good rhetoric after the G-20 meeting.
“It is undervalued,” Obama said of the yuan, speaking to reporters in Seoul after the meeting concluded. “And China spends enormous amounts of money intervening in the market to keep it undervalued.”
In case you missed it, China had a record surplus on trade.
Some good news for U.S. workers. Obama's negotiations with South Korea for yet another NAFTA styled trade agreement failed. There will be no new trade agreement. This one was a battle of the businesses, the labor arbitrage loving statistical spin machine U.S. Chamber of Commerce against U.S. auto makers Ford and Chrysler.
President Barack Obama won’t be returning from his Asia trip with a renegotiated free trade agreement between the U.S. and South Korea. Concerns over barriers to American automakers selling more vehicles in that country remain a point of contention.
The Obama administration had hoped to reach a deal on the free trade agreement first settled in 2007. That deal was never formally approved by either nation, and congressional Democrats – particularly those in the House – had balked because of concerns that U.S. automakers still couldn’t compete on equal footing in South Korea.
This week, Chrysler Group LLC joined Ford in opposing the deal as written. Last week, Ford took out a full-page ad claiming that for every 52 Korean cars sold in the U.S. only one American car is sold in South Korea.
Of course the Obama administration is pledging to keep at it, but the House, including the new Republicans might have some different ideas.
In a joint statement, current House Ways and Means Chairman Sander Levin, a Royal Oak Democrat, and his presumptive replacement, Republican Dave Camp of Midland, said “Further negotiations will succeed only if South Korea adopts concrete steps to open its market to U.S. exports” including autos.
Over one quarter of Americans between the ages of 18-64 do not have any health insurance. The CDC released a new study showing 59.1 million Americans do not have health insurance and even worse, the people who cannot afford it are increasingly members of the middle class.
The 26% excludes the population which qualifies for Medicare (age 65 or older).
The online real estate site Zillow, released a new research study where they conclude home prices will continue to fall until Q2 2011...at the earliest. Why? One word: foreclosures.
The September 2010 U.S. trade deficit decreased $2.5 billion to $44.0 billion. August's trade deficit was revised, from $46.347 to $46.5 billion. The decline in the trade deficit was due to a $2.0 billion drop in imports. Exports increased $0.5 billion. China alone was 47.5% of the trade deficit.
"There are two fundamental reforms we need - to get adequate capital and, two, to get far higher levels of enforcements of statutes of fraud statutes, existing ones. I'm not even talking about new ones. Things were being done which were certainly illegal and fairly criminal in certain cases. Fraud, fraud is a fact. Fraud creates very considerable instability in competitive markets. If you cannot trust your counterparties, it won't work. And indeed, we saw that it didn't." Alan Greenspan Nov. 9, 2010
Maybe it's because he has the queen of offshore outsourcing, Diana Farrell on his National Economics Council. Regardless, President Obama is wrong. India is indeed a poacher of U.S. jobs. How else do you think their offshore outsourcing industry is $50 billion a year, with 60% of that coming from the U.S. representing 1.32 million U.S. jobs lost.
Right now we have 17 million college graduates working as waitresses and sales clerks. We just saw in this 60 Minutes report PhDs, Masters degrees, people with advanced skills, grateful to get a part-time job at Target. We have 11 U.S. industries not employing Americans, U.S. workers, but where most workers are offshore or brought in as cheap labor.
Anyone else wondering how a President, who just received a red tidal wave that was a
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