GLG News by Mr. Jack Lifton, Managing Director
Analyses are solely the work of the authors and have not been edited or endorsed by GLG.
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Chrysler Is Moving To Reduce Its Michigan Operations To A Minimum; Is Chrysler Movin' On Out?
February 22, 2008
Chrysler hires Tata of India for data work | www.freep.com
Chrysler has informed its American document management contractors that it will be consolidating its Michigan operations into one location, it's Auburn Hills, Michigan, headquarters complex dominated by the 12 story building with the Pentastar symbol on its top front face and once upon a time called the Lee Iacocca Building. It has further informed those contractors that they must work with Tata IT in India until such time as their own services in the US, the exact time to be decided by Chrysler IT management, is no longer needed. Chryslers in-house IT group is completely demoralized, because they see the handwriting on their computer screens.
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February 18, 2008
Silicon Valley Starts to Turn Its Face to the Sun | www.nytimes.com
The global production of the semi-metal tellurium is less than 100 tons per year. The use of tellurium in thin-film solar cells is dissipative. It is most efficiently used in combination with the element cadmium. Cadmium is very toxic, and tellurium is also toxic although it may be less toxic than cadmium.
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February 18, 2008
Rough Road For Hybrids In China | www.businessweek.com
China's dominance in the producton of rare earth metals gives it the ability to blackmail Toyota, which has so far refused to make some hybrid components in China for reasons of competitive advantage. GM has already thrown in the towel on this issue by making all of the components for its Chinese Buick hybrid in China. Are Chinese battery researchers and manufacturers holding even a sharper Damoclean sword over the necks of foreign hybrid hopefuls?
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February 18, 2008
As Nuclear Waste Languishes, Expense To U.S. Rises | www.nytimes.com
The waste production of nuclear power plants is a function both of the frequency of removing waste products and of refueling. Many reactors currently in use and with many years of operation remaining could be retrofitted to utilize thorium in place of much of or all of their uranium. This would eliminate ultimately the production of weapons grade material at those retrofitted plants. Thus the US, and the world, would be a safer place. In addition the fuel refurbishing and replacement cycle for thorium reactors is much less frequent than for pure uranium reactors, so less waste is generated.
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February 14, 2008
Auto industry is death-bound: CAW | www.thestar.com
Is there one single common thread that weaves its way through the abysmal performance of the American OEM automotive industry in the twenty-first century? Yes, there is. It is ego and hubris, which manifests itself in a total lack of long term planning to manage the risks of things not going as the industry's 'leaders' say they are going to go. Canada's Canadian Auto Worker's union proposes that no company be allowed to sell more in Canada than it reciprocally buys. But the CAW leader does not realize that Canadian natural resources are buoying the Canadian economy at levels which simply drown any possible earning from manufactured goods. No Canadian government is going to interfere with Canada's massive earnings from the export of natural resources to save a few obsolete overpriced manufacturing jobs in foreign owned car plants.
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Are The OEM Automobile Companies Just Leaving Michigan Or Abandoning The US?
February 13, 2008
States of Opportunity | online.wsj.com
Last year two people moved out of Michigan for good for every one who settled in Michigan from another state or country. General Motors lost and wrote off a combined 37 billion dollars in 2007; the largest corporate loss in American history. Michigan has the highest official unemployment rate, nearly 8%, of any state in the union. General Motors has just this week offered a 'buyout' to all 74,000 of its hourly employees in the US so as to enable the company to replace them with much lower paid workers. This will bring to 500,000 the number of former auto workers 'terminated through buyouts' by the Detroit Three in the last 5 years most of whom continue to live unemployed and unemployable in Michigan. Is Michigan already in recession, and is Michigan finished as an industrial state?
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Has The Chevrolet Volt Program Been Short Circuited By Economic And Engineering Reality?
February 12, 2008
Tomorrow’s Whodunit: Who Might Kill the Chevrolet Volt | www.hybridcars.com
Has General Motors oversold itself, and the public, on the Chevrolet Volt lithium battery plug-in hybrid program? If so, why? And, also, if so, is GM going to wake up and cancel it before the program's cost escalate further?
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Palladium Flat Lined Years Ago, So Why Raise Future's Margins Now?
February 11, 2008
NYMEX to Change Margins for Palladium Futures Contracts | nymex.mediaroom.com
There has been no speculation in palladium since late 2001 when its price collapsed. What then caused the NYMEX to suddenly raise the margins on palladium futures as if a wave of speculation were about to begin?
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Chrysler Would'a, Could'a, Should'a Been Like Toyota. Now It's Too Late
February 11, 2008
Turning Chrysler Into Toyota | www.businessweek.com
Lee Iacooca Restructured Chrysler just as he had restructured and saved Ford before that, and it worked for him and "the New Chrysler Corporation" again. Juergen Schremp sang (to the melody from My Fair Lady) "Why Can't A Chrysler Be More Like A Daimler" as he restructured the company to become an entry level vehicle maker for Daimler. That didn't work, because the agenda was never allowed to get off the ground, and it harmed both companies by drainig resources. Finally John Snow who impusively bought Chrysler from Daimler hired Bob Nardelli to restructure Chrysler with the idea, at first, that Chrysler could be made over into a Home Depot for cars. Now, since he can't think of what else to do, Nardelli is hiring Toyota marketing people to make Chrysler look like a Home Depot that operates and has made for it cars such as those made by Toyota. It isn't going to work. I hope the 2010 liquidators can unravel the mess and get some value out of the wreckage.
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February 8, 2008
Saying 'I Love You' With a Metal Alloy | online.wsj.com
The last time that gold reached an all time high price, prior to last week, was in 1980 when its price reached $847 per troy ounce. Since then inflation has taken the 1980 dollar to $2.67 in 2008 dollars; this means that for gold to sell today at the same price it reached in 1980 it would have to be priced at $2228 per troy ounce. Since gold, last week, only reached a price of less than $950 (2008) and has since dropped back to the $900 (2008) level it is clear that gold is not a hedge against inflation nor is it a store of value. It is, in fact, a jewelry manufacturing material, which is now already too expensive to be used in a pure state. It is possible that within a few generations gold will only be remembered as a once important means of exchange once used on account of a perceived and generally agreed upon and accepted intrinsic value
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February 7, 2008
Are Hybrids Pointless without Lithium? | www.hybridcarblog.com
It is technologically pointless to wait for the advent of safe reliable lithium technology based batteries before ramping up the production of hybrid vehicles. The main issues holding back the production of hybrids, plug-in hybrids, and battery powered, all electric, passenger and small cargo vehicles are the questions of how the car makers can back off from promises of totally unnecessary performance and how they can get their customers to pay for batteries of either type, nickel metal hydride or lithium, which are very much more expensive than any batteries the public has ever before been asked to buy.
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February 6, 2008
Chrysler rocked by war with supplier | www.freep.com
Is privately owned Chrysler acting out the role of champion for American OEM heavy industry in its battle with OEM automotive supplier, Plastech Engineering? Is Chrysler obligated to continue to do business, and lose money because of it, with an insolvent supplier due to social and political demands thinly disguised as legal obligations enabled by an interpretation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was never intended to bring this about? What part did affirmative action have in bringing down the OEM American automotive industry when that industry tried to compete with global car makers in the American domestic market?
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February 5, 2008
World's First Lithium-Ion Automotive Battery Plant Opens | blog.wired.com
SAFT is at it again. In 1996 the company had a lithium-ion battery production plant in Connecticut. The batteries made there never caught the public's fancy, so around that time, 1996, SAFT sold the plant and its equipment to a Chinese battery maker and moved out of the US market back to France. What's going to be different this time? Probably only that this experiment will be very costly and tie up scarce resources.
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February 4, 2008
Automakers debate $200 million Plastech bailout | home.autonews.com
Minority business enterprise development was most 'successful,' in terms of volume of dollars generated,in the OEM American automotive industry. The big question always was: Did minority suppliers make money for themselves and save money for the OEM American automotive industry? There is no central place to go to look at the financial results of minority business enterprise as it relates to the OEM American automotive industry. Is this because this segment of minority business enterprise has never made a profit?
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January 25, 2008
Renault-Nissan signs deal to develop mass-market electric vehicles in Israel | www.forbes.com
A US Company called Project Better Place has figured out a 'better place' to try out a total solution to the implementation of a battery powered electric car strategy than the US, Israel. Renault-Nissan, which recognizes that no large industrial nation such as the US or France is small enough to test out a total electric car support system has recognized that such a test in Israel could, if successful, well give Renault-Nissan the experience to take a commanding lead in the race to build a practical electric car manufacturing, fueling, sales and service system. A successful test will also give Renault-Nissan the opportunity to build 2 million cars just for the Israeli market. This could be nearly fifty billion dollars in initial sales.
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January 23, 2008
Russia's RUSAL, Norilsk discuss full merger -paper | www.reuters.com
The Red Army, along with the Soviet Air Force and Fleet (Navy) controlled more destructive power than any other military machine in history, but this force was unable to give the (former) Soviet union control of the world, or even to preserve the Soviet union as a political structure. Today, a very small group of men operating as ethnic Russians, who we call the 'Oligarchs,' i.e., the controllers of great wealth, have transformed the mismanaged former Soviet mining, smelting, refining, and fabricating industries into a Russian natural resources empire with far greater potential reach than any Czar or Chairman of the Council of Ministers could have ever dreamed. One of them, Oleg Deripaska, around forty years old, has risen to the top recently.
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January 22, 2008
Suppliers pushed on green initiatives | www.ft.com
Each time that first American and then European politicians succumb to pressure from small well organized pressure groups for social 'action,' they pass the costs of such action onto large, usually publicly owned, businesses, and usually also, specifically, exempt small, usually privately owned, businesses to avoid piling onto the small businesses the costs of mandatory compliance. But, as soon as the lights of the TV cameras and the laptops go dark, the newly regulated large, public, businesses immediately pass the new costs onto their supply bases while carefully taking the credit for compliance all to themselves.
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January 22, 2008
Federal mileage estimates to drop in a few years | www.contracostatimes.com
If you 'cannot' simply swap out the nickel metal hydride battery pack of an existing hybrid vehicle for one of the 'new' lithium technology battery packs 'when 'they become 'available' in 'about 3 to 5 years' then the hybrid car is a very strange machine.
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January 21, 2008
An Unconvincing Shade of Green | www.nytimes.com
The lead-acid battery was mass produced for more than twenty-five years, before it was ever used in a car. The lithium technology battery has been in development for mobile applications for nearly fifty years. The nickel metal hydride battery has been mass produced for fifteen years, and has been used in every hybrid car made by a mass producer for the last ten years. No one has any mass production experience of the safety, reliability, or ability of any lithium technology, other than lithium cobalt ion batteries, made for personal entertainment products, and those have been plagued by a perceived tendency to overheat and in laptop applications to have caused some recorded fires and perhaps deaths.
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January 18, 2008
The Rule of Iron: He Who Has the Iron Ore Makes the Rules | www.resourceinvestor.com
As the American dollar declines in value against the currencies of China, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Japan, and Europe it becomes much cheaper for those countries and/or their businesses to invest in the American domestic mining industry; to manufacture in the US using domestic American raw materials and labor; and to buy domestic American raw materials on long term contracts. Isn't this exactly what happened when foreign, mainly US, businessmen went to China for its low costs?
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