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As one wonders how the housing crisis will affect sales of items like cars and other items, its interesting to note that in addition to subprime borrowers who should never have taken the mortgage in the first place because of lack of proper credit background, there are borrowers who were otherwise healthy but are in a financial bind because of house flipping or speculative buying in the hope of gaining from the speculative price increases. These are defaults on prime quality loans and about 21 to 32 percent of the prime quality loan defaults in California, Nevada, Arizona, and Florida are mortgages with homes not occupied by the owner. Note that Goldman Sachs estimates that housing prices will fall about 7% this year and another 7% next year. These estimates may change as the housing crisis deepens with more foreclosures on subprime and prime properties.

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Ford takes a $2.7 billion charge for Argo startup in driverless cars and says  fully profitable fully autonomous vehicles at scale are a long way off. Ford and VW have each a 40% stake in Argos startup. Ford will now concentrate on partial automated features already offered.

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Novartis bought form Nestle SA a 25% stake in Alcon for $11 billion with an option to buy Nestles's remaining 52% holding in 2010 and combine its eye care operations with Alcon's. But there is uncertainty about how this will work out and at what price Nestle will sell as share price of Alcon has dropped. This leaves Novartis in a bind when it comes to other acquisitions as it has to raise and set aside capital to complete the Alcon acquisition. Novartis raised $5.5 billion in debt in February 2009, and $2.2 billion in a bond sale in June, and will raise more capital.

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The Economist cites figures showing Canada lost 500,000 manufacturing jobs since 2005, with employment in manufacturing down to 1.7 million by 2013. From 2000 to 2013 manufacturing's share of GDP declined from 18% to 10%. This situation is shown by the decaying manufacturing towns seen in Ontario. About 500,000 manufacturing jobs were lost between 2005 and 2013, as the price of oil increased to the $100-$120 range and the Canadian currency was overvalued, leaving the Canadian economy more dependent on energy exports. Some of the auto manufacturing supplier base has shifted from the midwest to southern U.S. states, reducing the attractiveness of Ontario for manufacturing investment. Overvalued currencies have hurt the manufacturing sector of commodity producing countries dependent on exports of mining products or oil, especially Brazil and Canada. The depreciation of the Canadian currency in 2014-2015 may not help, as many of these jobs are not likely to return.

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Skepticism about GM's share price and recovery because of management turnover, a cooling off in the Chinese market to 8% growth from 30% in fourth quarter 2010, and fears that the incentives at $3300 per vehicle will again become the norm. GM had its third CEO since coming out of bankruptcy in 2009.

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The Legislative Analyst's office, California's budget watchdog, estimates a budget shortfall of $25 billion through fiscal 2012, with a $6 billion shortfall for the current year. California is issuing bonds to make up the shortfall. A $10 billion offer of short term bonds generated decent demand according to fund managers. California will also issue $2 billion of Build America bonds. This is happening as the demand for municipal bonds is slowing and yields are rising.