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The new Ford Focus being unveiled at the Detroit Auto Show in 2009, is a new kind of car for Ford. This is a new kind of effort, a new discipline that Ford CEO Mullaly has advocated from the beginning. Making one car for all markets worldwide. Early on Mullaly told Ford's chairman Bill Ford that Boeing did not have a 737 for Europe and a 737 for the US and a 737 for Asia, why was Ford building a Focus for Europe and a Focus for the USA. In fact before Mullaly the Focus for the USA was a stripped down version of the European Focus and did not make much of an impression. The new Focus will have 80% common parts and 75% of parts from the same suppliers worldwide, so that a Focus made in Germany and the USA will share the same parts as a Focus made in Russia and a Focus made in China. And all of these plants will go into production at about the same time with the new Focus. To accomplish this transformation of Ford for "One Ford" worldwide, which is also on every business card carried by Ford managers, Mullaly appointed Derrick Kuzak as head of global manufacturing. See link for Derrick Kuzak. And the strategy was announced in mid-2008 with the start of retooling of truck factories in Mexico, Kentucky and Michigan, to make small cars designed in Europe for global markets. The task of coming up with one design for a global car was given to Martin Smith, a British designer based in Cologne, Germany. Smith says tastes are converging worldwide with the internet use, and customers are more unified than one would think, and whats emerging is a new kind of global cool if one looks for it. This is what happened when Focus protypes were shown to consumer panels in Europe, the USA and Asia, with a good impression created in all 3 markets. Aligning the US and European tastes was easier, China was a bit harder and the yellow leather interior popular in Shanghai had to be crossed out. Another challenge that had to be met in adisciplined manner was the varying safety rules and emissions around the world. For example European designers liked to have the windshield further forward, and Ford's global small car chief had to tell his engineers to move it back to meet US crumple zone standards. Similiar challenges had to be met in purchasing by global purchasing chief, Tony Brown, with a massive coordination effort needed to be done globally. And plastic trim from Michigan has to fit perfectly with sheet metal stamped in Michigan, and Ford used a virtual manufacturing system that allows the car to be built in cyberspace, and the bugs taken out at that early virtual build stage. The entire change is part of a metamorphosis at Ford, a change of culture and mastering a new discipline in coordinated effort worldwide for "One Ford." One year ago the Wayne Truck plant here in Detroit made the Navigator and the Expedition large vehicles.. With a $550 million investment this plant will make the Ford Focus a year from now. ...

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Whites are aging faster in the U.S., census figures show, and white deaths are higher than white births as the birthrate for whites declines. This is also leading to anxiety among whites about uncontrolled immigration, and behind the Republican party's moves on immigration. The effects of world trade and the hollowing out of some industries with the effect on local communities in the U.S. has exacerbated the anxiety. Signs of this were evident in the last decade leading to the Trump campaign based on immigration issues and trade in the 2016 election, which resonate more in the mid sections of the U.S. with the lack of the tech industry and financial industry of the two coasts.

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The Bush tax plan simplifies the tax code and cuts the highest rate from the current 39.6% to 28%. It reduces the corporate tax rate to 20% and favors business investment. The tax on income earned by companies overseas is gradually phased out in the plan. It is designed to jumpstart growth. Jeb Bush balances his plan by creating some element of fairness by doubling the standard deduction, expanding earned income credit, limiting itemized deductions to 2%, and ending loopholes for hedge funds such as "carried interest." Jeb Bush has lamented the loss of income and economic mobility for the working class and lower middle class in the U.S., more than most of the Republican candidates, and this tax plan takes this into account, by betting that working class and lower income people benefit most from higher growth, better job mobility, and wage growth, as well as an element of fairness in taxes.

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Mort Kunstler, a painter in Long Island, has a more historically correct painting of George Washington crossing the Delaware River on Christmas Day 1776 to attack Hessian forces in the Battle of Trenton. The crossing was made on a 50 foot flatboat ferry and not in a smaller boat as shown in the classic painting- the 1851 portrait, "Washington Crossing the Delaware," by Emmanuel Leutze. Leutze did not have good access to historical detail when he created the painting in Germany. Leutze's painting is the most asked-about painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It shows Washington in a heroic posture. The new painting by Kuntsler is smaller, more realistic in details, and was commissioned by Thomas Suozzi. Suozzi was inspired by David McCullough's book "1776," and says Washington's decision to rally his troops with a victory during an especially bleak period is something that impresses him most. It will be displayed at the New York Historical Society in Manhattan.

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Facebook says in its IPO filing that it has 845 millon users worldwide. This is up 39% from the prior year. Revenue is up 88% from the prior year. Facebook's 2011 revenue is $4.27 billion, according to eMarketer. Facebook's 2011 profit was up 65% from the prior year. Analysts say costs and expenses are growing faster than revenues. R&D costs including employee hiring and equity compensation went up to $114 million in 2011 from $9 million in 2010. Facebook had 3,200 employees in Dec. 2011, compared to 2,172 in the prior year. Revenues come from online ads. Ads on the Facebook site increased by 42% in 2011 over the prior year, and average price per ad increased by 18% in this period. Ads are generated using the information provided by users on demographic factors, age, location, gender, education, work history and specific interests- so that subsets of users can be targeted by advertiserrs of products.

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The retirement age in France is much lower than other European countries. As people live longer and pension system finances are strained retirement ages are being increased. In France the retirement age is 60, and dates back to the Socialist president Francois Mitterand in the 1980's when the Socialists and the unions strongly supported a retirement age of 60 and a 35 hour work week. Socialist party former general secretary, Francois Hollande, calls changes "unjust reform." The Sarkozy government is treading softly by making a gradual change with the legal retirement age increasing by 4 months per year starting in July 2011, till it reaches 62 by 2018. The pension deficit is forecast at $40 billion a year for 2010. People in taxing jobs or in difficult occupations are exempted. By contrast Germany as plans to change the retirement age from 65 o 67. Britain and Italy have set this at 65.

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Flipkart, India's largest online retailer, was started by 2 Amazon executives in 2007. Flipkart has 22 million registered users and hosts 3000 merchants selling products ranging from electronics to clothing. Flipkart sales reached $1 billion in the last 12 months. In July 2014 Flipkart raised $1 billion from a group of investors including Tiger Global Management, Morgan Stanley Investment Management, Singapore's sovereign wealth fund GIC. This follows the raising of $210 million in May 2014 from a group of investors led by DST Global, a Russian investor. Competitors include Amazon and eBay backed SnapDeal. Funds raised will be used to hire more engineers and improve mobile technologies, as over half of sales are made on mobile phones. India's online retail market is expected to grow 11 fold to $23 billion by 2018, according to Nomura brokerage firm. Flipkart earns money by charging merchants a fee for products sold on its online website.

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Important research presented by experts from University of Chicago, Princeton university Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, presented at a forum in New York on the Federal Reserve organized by the University of chicago and Brandeis University. The presentation indicates that there will be amagnified effect of the current credit crisis once you take into account the accounting rules to use market prices and the risk practices of financial institutions that lead to adding to reserves. They calculate that leveraged institutions like banks, thrifts and securtities dealers will want to boost their capital to asset ratios by 5% because of the increased risk. Even after raising $100 billion in new capital (such as the money raised from sovereign funds) these institutions will still try to shrink their assets of about $20.5 trillion by about $2 trillion. The impact of this would be to restrict lending in a magnified effect and could cost the economy about 1.5% points in growth.

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GM shares dropped by 31% October 8, 2008 to a postwar low. And Jeff Schuster head of auto forecasting at JD Power says the global market in 2009 may experience an outright collapse. The slowdown will extend to Europe, China, india and Brazil. Previously JD Power estimated sales at 14 million for 2009 now it thinks it will be more like 13.2 million in 2009 and this may come up for revision as the economic downturn deepens with higher unemployment, loss in savings, and collapsing consumption. With access to financing drying up, and sales collapsing GM is rnning low on funds to run day to day operations and is expected to be acutely short by the end of 2009. Ford faces a similar situation. One forecast by Citigroup global markets in the link in Detroit News October 9 points to only abot $1 billion remaining by the end of 2009 and even with asset sales generating some $5 billion being thin ice for GM.

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Deep labor problems that have plagued Detroit automakers throughout the years since the 1930 labor-management strife. The labor advantages enjoyed by the Japanese and the Germans after postwar compact between labor and management in Japan and Germany, that was continued in plants in the US in locations with no labor history. The higher executive compensation and privileges of management in the American management model that did not exist in the Japanese and German models that created another level of distrust of management. The recovery staged by Chrysler in the 1980's withthe minivan and by Ford with new models. The recovery again in the 1990's by Ford and GM with the sports utility vehicle and pickup trucks. And the collapse Chrysler, GM and Ford face today, facing bankruptcy or government bailout on a large scale as rising oil prices and the need for conservation lead to a collapse of the sports utility and pickup market and shift to fuel efficient passenger cars.

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Zweig points out that P/E multiples fall quickly in the midst of higher uncertainty. Benjamin Graham's "cyclically adjusted" P/E refined by Yale economist Robert Shiller smooths out the top and bottoms of the market by averaging the past 10 years of earnings and incorporating effects of inflation. This "cyclically adjusted" P/E for the U.S. market for the last 50 years is 19.5. The P/E for the market when the S&P 500 was at 1325 in late July 2011 was 22.9, and at the low in the first week of August 2011 of 1167 was 20.2. With the higher uncertainty- as for instance Bank of New York Mellon charging clients to hold cash- the P/E multiples are in a different territory. The P/E dropped to 13.3 in March 2009 after the financial crisis of 2008. Larger macroeconomic trends and uncertainty may have yet to play out and not registered fully in the market indexes. Jack Hough throws light on this from a different angle in the Wall Street Journal, August 5, 2011 comparing stagnant wages and its relationship with corporate earnings....

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The contrast between lack of effective measures taken in the Lombardy region with the aggressive action in Veneto that has proved effective. Veneto followed the method of quarantining, mass testing for clusters and isolating the affected people.  The Italian government took the first steps to close off northern Italy Feb 22, and it was not till March 10 that a nationwide lockdown was done. The action taken in the Veneto region is shown here in this WSJ report with the town of Vo as an example of steps taken that worked. A microbiology professor and infectious diseases expert at the University of Padua, Dr Crisanti, developed a test for the coronavirus as early as mid-January using the information made public by Chinese doctors. Dr. Crisanti oversaw the testing of 95% of residents of Vo, a town of 3400 people in Veneto region. He found 3% of the population was infected, with half testing positive asymptomatic. Following the aggressive lockdown the tests were done two weeks later and the rate of infection had fallen to 0.1% with only 8 new infections. "The main lesson from VO is that when you have a cluster of infected people, you should do a very aggressive lockdown and then test as many people as possible," Dr Crisanti says. The results from Vo led to Veneto increasing testing in the rest of the region carrying out 80,000 tests, compared to 88,000 in Lombardy, with double the population and 5 times more infections. Lombardy followed government directives to test only those with symptoms. When it spreads it is harder to do the test isolate clusters, test isolate clusters, in a continual loop, yet this remains the method cited by Dr. Brx in the U.S. today as the right way to target clusters in a laser approach. In yesterday's briefing at the White House Dr Brx said this is a method the U.S. is familiar with and has used in Africa to tackle HIV, Ebola Virus. It is possible using GPS to target down to a specific clinic in a specific place, which is how it was successfully done in Africa. ...

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The U.S. Justice Department initiated an effort in July 2016 to recover $1 billion in assets of the Malaysian Development Fund 1MDB from which money has been diverted according to the investigation. Prosecutors say the $1 billion is only part of billions diverted from the fund.

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The Nikkei Stock Average reaches 20868 on June 24, 2015, the highest level since December 5, 1996. The Japanese yen is at 123.83, a level which boosts the prospects of exporters. Since October the Nikkei has received support from buying by the large government pension fund, a weak Japanese yen, and buying by foreign investors.

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U.S. president Obama does not plan to make some of the changes recommended by the presidential panel reviewing NSA surveillance and spying policies. Separation of the NSA and Cyber Command leadership was one, and the other was having phone records of Americans be held by a third party or phone companies and not the NSA.

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European new auto registrations down by 25% in November and about 7% for the first 11 months from ayear earlier. GM hit hardest with 38% decline in November for Opel and Vauxhall and Swedish Saab declining by 45%. VW holding up with a17% decline and Ford at 20% decline in November 2008 over ayear earlier.

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Novartis CEO, Joseph Jimenez, is interviewed by the WSJ's Marta Falconi. Jimenez sees the need to focus on patient outcomes and giving payers incentive by reducing total hospitalization cost through better drugs. One area he sees the pharmaceutical industry needing to change is to invest more in R&D, and less in sales and marketing.

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AIG's bad bets on housing were made right under the supervision of a "college' of global bureaucrats and regulators in the Office of Thrift Supervision, according to its acting director Polakoff, says the WSJ editorial.

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The 2015 budget for the European Union borders agency Frontex was increased by 17.5% from 97 million euros to 114 million euros, yet it remains underfunded with the huge influx of refugees through Greece and from Turkey. For 2016 the budget increases by 54% to 176 million euros. It is based in Warsaw, Poland. It does not have its own border guards, planes and ships, which are provided to it by the member states of the EU and paid for from its budget. It was not deisigned to address a problem of this magnitude at EU borders and some new form of the agency needs to be developed.

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Sluggish sales of GM cars in mature markets like Germany and in markets with exacerbated credit crunch like Spain lead to decliing sales for GM's Opel brand in Western Europe. GM announced that sales in western Europe declined by 11% during the first three quarters of the year. The Opel brand is the higher margin brand for GM and is prominent in western Europe. Its Chevy brand is prominent in Eastern Europe and these sales increased by 43%. In Russia the mood is uncertain as September sales for Chevy declined by 2% and Ford's sales slipped 13%. GM's shares dropped 19% on Thursday October 9 to $5.57.

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Efforts to develop the next generation Ukrainian aircraft industry from its current moribund state by discarding the old Soviet model. Attracting new foreign investment alongside state investment, modern management, preserving intellectual property rights, and looking for contracts across Europe, is critical for future development. Ukraine has a history of technology development and design in the aircraft industry, which makes this industry a good candidate for export revenues. The first mass produced helicopter was made in the U.S. and used a Sikorsky design in 1936. Igor Sikorsky is from Kiev, Ukraine, and immigrated to the U.S. in 1919, as Soviets took control of Russia. His son was a vice president of United Technologies Sikorsky helicopter division. (Wikipedia). MacFarquhar describes this industry in its new form at its early beginnings- a decade from now the industry under good management could provide large export revenues. Many of the old Soviet auto plants also developed in this direction with investments and technology from companies such as Renault, GM and others, helping revive the industry. There are no spheres of influence in modern industry- Ukraine, Russia, Europe, and the U.S., all benefit from openness to new technology and investment, which improve the economy and living standards. ...

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Spain's Budget minister, Cristobal Montero, said the government would have a new credit line and provide an early infusion of $10 billion to aid financially troubled regions. Many of the regions are in such financial straits that they are unable to pay suppliers, and this is putting many small businesses in serious difficulties. Spain's prime minister Rajoy says the Spanish government needs to be concerned about what is happening in the regions, and that he would help regions as long as they meet their budget goals. Spain adopted a decentralized model after the years of the Franco dictatorship, and regions handle education, health care and social services, culture and providing services. With the economic crisis following years of free spending by the regions, the extent of this autonomy and the lack of budget controls is being called into question. Officials from regions such as Aragon, Valencia and Murcia have called on the federal government to play a bigger role.

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On the surface Turkey's implementation of an IMF program to reduce its deficit in 2001 has lessons for Greece, but looked at closely the situation has some serious differences. Turkish tax collection was weak and this was corrected by the incoming Erdogan administration, salaries were capped and spending was reduced, taxes raised and state assets sold to improve the deficit. But as Tim Ash an economist at RBS bank points out, achieving GDP growth will be very difficult for Greece. For one thing Turkey's lira fell 54% against the dollar in 2001, spurring exports and increasing growth. Greece is part of the euro currency system and this won't be part of the solution. Also Turkey's debt approached 80% of GDP in 2001 (down to 46% of GDP now), compared to 115% for Greece in 2010, so Greece is in a much worse position than Turkey in 2001. Ash sees a restructuring of debt as the best way to restore growth in Greece.