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Ray Dolby of Dolby Labs was a pioneer in electronics field of noise reduction for tape recordings. Listening to the early reel to reel tape recordings with the loud hissing sound at intervals Dolby took up the task of coming up with noise reduction technology. He had studied engineering at Stanford and worked at Ampex Corporation in the San Francisco area. The early Dolby recordings technology came out in the seventies and was improved till the Dolby technology could be fitted on a small chip. The research work by Dolby led to 50 patents. He was sole owner and member of the Board of Directors of Dolby Labs till it went public in 2005, earning royalties for his inventions.

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Closing the plant at Genk in Belgium cost Ford an estimated $750 million and years of difficulty with workers and the community. The plant employs 4300 workers and the cost comes to about $190,000 per worker. Many auto plants in Europe are operating at about 60% of capacity in 2013, and about 7-8 million units of car and light truck capacity remains idle, by some estimates. Ford was compelled to take this action because of billions of dollars of losses for Ford Europe as sales declined because of the eurozone financial crisis and austerity measures.

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Voters back about $10 billion in bonds to start a high speed rail network system for California and $18 billion for expanding mass transit service in Seattle. About 23 initiatives were approved that would inject $75 billion into transportation systems according to the Center for Transportation Excellence. About 70% of transportation funding measures on the ballot were approved showing voter support.

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Perino, the White House spokewoman says the automaker's plight won't be a blight on President Bush's legacy, such is the mood at the White House and among Republicans. But reading the comments of readers on this piece and next to it. people of all political views oppose helping the automakers so its a popular stand, and practically all think the management and boards has to go and the union contracts have to go so the depth of feeling about this issue is real. Most everyone sees the fault as Detroit auto companies own fault.

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After all the fuss TARP will not buy up troubled assets like mortgage securities held by banks and will focus on injecting capital into banks and other needs.

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China's slowdown may be much worse than is generally thought. Germany went through this thinking that it was relatively safe as it had no housing bubble and no consumer debt like the US and the UK. But the drop in demand from China and other countries has led already to a contraction in the German economy by 0.5% in the third quarter of 2008, expected to worsen to 0.8% in 2009. China's National Statistics Bureau announced a 4% decline in electricity output inOctober from a year earlier. This is a result partly of factories manufacturing for export cutting back as their orders decline. There was a 17 drop in production of pig iron and crude steel in October and a 0.7% fall in output in the output sector. From all this it appears that even without the beggar thy neigbor policies of the 1930's, even without the protectionism of that period and even with the global coordination of the G20 and the G7 countries, its hard not to see the impact in one place flowing through to other places. The loss of export markets in the USA for Chinese export factories leads to this slowdown in China which in turn now needs much fewer machinery imports from Germany leading to a contraction in Germany. See the link to German economy in WSJ November 14, 2008. These effects show up in an exaggerated manner with economic contraction because of the heavy dependence on exports in Germany to China, and heavy dependence on exports in China to the USA, and the heavy consumption of Chinese exports in the USA, all ocurring in an exaggerated unsustainable way considering the American spending binge and the zero savings rate in the USA, the pressures on the environment with runaway growth in China, and the lack of any domestic led consumption in Germany. China's infrastructure spending can provide some growth along with the stimulus spending but much of the export led growth may disappear. The stimulus spending could help prevent a contraction in the Chinese economy but may deliver only a few points of growth, way off from the runaway over 10% growth of two decades which was heavily dependent on manufacturing exports. How badly Chinese exports are affected depends on how badly the US market is affected for Chinese imports. Higher unemployment in the US if the auto industry sees a collapse in its market in 2009, would lead to lower consumption in the US as laid off workers cut their purchases at Walmarts and Targets and at other retailers, and this would drive imports from China to even lower levels, wiping off a couple of percentage points of China's GDP growth rate. ...

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The Economist argues against a bailout ot Detroit automakers and says Chapter 11 could be made to work. the alternative is to get preferred equity in return for bailout money.

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If you are Exxon or Exxon's CEO Tillerson there are no regrets and its a hydrocarbopn world for as far as you can see and that is decades from now. Or has success made Exxon grow complacent when new winds are blowing.

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A professor of Environmental Design asks that GM be asked to build innovative transportation systems in addition to fuel efficient cars by the government in return for rescue money. He cites the warnings given by Stewart Udall, an interior secretary under John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson about overdependence on mideast oil. See the article on Exxon's Tillerson's vision of a world based on hydrocarbons for decades still. Someone may rub his eyes and ask whats going on?

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In talking about the systemic risks of the failure of GM, about 3 million jobs depend on the auto industry with 1,187,000 employed by dealerships of which 325,000 are employed in GM dealerships. Another concern is that GM's pension obligations are underfunded by $18 billion at the end of 2008 according to Deutsche Bank. This would be added to the $11 billion deficit at the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. were GM to fail.

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A Prof. at New York University School of Law on why bankruptcy is the only viable option for GM, and his reasoning, including GM's legacy costs hard to get rid of without bankruptcy, the DIP set aside for warranties or a DIP loan for this to reassure customers, and the need for urgency to reduce brands, facilities, plants, dealerships, and have contracts that are realistic for the times, and retiree benefits taken up by the PGBC.

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China's diesel imports declined by 46% in October year over year, according to General Administration of Customs, and China was a net exporter of gasoline for 2 months in a row, signs that the slump in China is serious.

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Temp hiring is seeing a slowdown in Aug-Sept 2012. It declined by 2000 jobs in Sept and made no gains in August. By contrast in the first 6 months about 21,000 temp jobs were added each month. The historical correlation since 1990 of changes in temp employment with ensuing job growth in the next 3 months is 77%. This indicates job growth in the fourth quarter of 2012 will be about 72,000 jobs a month says Irwin, not enough to keep up with population growth, and likely to lead to an uptick in the unemployment rate. The results at temp hiring firms Manpower and Robert Half confirm this trend.

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Expectations of lower inflation in the U.S. for 2012. The Commerce Department showed inflation slowing with consumer prices up 2.5% over the prior year in November, down from 2.7% in October and 2.9% in September. The Labor Department's consumer price index went up by 0.8% annual rate in the last 3 months. Increase in labor costs are also mild. Hourly wages of private sector U.S. workers were up 1.8% in November 2011 over the prior year. Commodity demand in emerging markets is slowing with lower growth, which reduces pressure on commodity prices. The consumer price index is expected to rise by 1.2% in 2012, according to J.P. Morgan economists. The Federal Reserve in its recent statement after a Dec. 13 meeting stated it expects inflation at below 2%.

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Duncan Moore of the University of Rochester points out what makes Pittsburgh, San Diego and Rochester different from Detroit, Cleveland and Fresno. The investment in the local community, large universities and the research money they bring in, the small businesses using advanced technologies and connecting with the universities, have helped these communities thrive even when a dominant employer or a dominant business has suffered decline. In Detroit's case it is also learning some of these lessons- the areas around Detroit such as Dearborn are recovering with the recovery of Ford Motor Company, and the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor is a major research hub with large federal funding, the Fiat engineered recovery at Chrysler is also giving new life to the region.

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Kodak Labs in Eastman Kodak Park, Rochester, New York, in 2015, as the struggle to come up with new applications to reinvent the company continues.

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The U.S. Labor Department reports that 4.4 million unemployed workers in the U.S. were out of work for more than one year. For the U.S. this is 30% of all unemployed. In some of the largest states about one in three unemployed workers have been out of work for more than one year. For New Jersey which has a 9.4% unemployment rate compared to 9.6% nationally, 37.1% were out of work for more than one year. Older Americans, the highly educated workers, are more likely to have longer stretches of unemployment. This is the situation in New Jersey and Florida where there is a larger population of older workers.

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Labor Department reports U.S. created 209,000 jobs in July 2014. The unemployment rate goes up slightly to 6.2%. Wages went up only by a penny and remain only 2% higher than a year ago. Retail was up by 27,000 jobs, manufacturing by 28,000 in July. Economists say the steep drop in the unemployment rate to 6.2% does not reflect the true conditions in the labor market, as the labor force participation rate is at 62.9%. One economist called this disturbing as some of the youngest workers are dropping out of the labor force. The Alliance for American Manufacuring pointed out that the U.S. manufacturing sector has recovered only about 30% of jobs lost during the recession following the 2009 financial crisis. It said the the lack of investment in infrastructure, high trade deficits and currency manipulation by China and Japan, remain obstacles for American manufacturing's resurgence.