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  • GM and Citigroup Replaced by Cisco and Travelers in the Dow

    Starting next Monday GM and Citigroup will no longer be in the list of 30 companies making up the Dow Jones Industrial Average. I posted in 2005 that GM should be dropped from the DJIA. GE has lasted in the Dow for more than 100 years. 12 of the 30 stocks have been added since 1997. Cisco and Travelers are the companies that are joining the Dow on June 8th.

    The 30 stocks of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, as of June 8th, 2009:

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    Stock Market Capitalization Year Added
    Exxon (XOM)             $347 Billion     1928
    Walmart (WMT) 195     1997
    Microsoft 189     1999
    Proctor & Gamble (PG) 155     1932
    Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) 153     1997
    GE 147     1896
    AT&T (T) 145     1999
    IBM 143     1979
    JPMorgan Chase (JPM) 141     1991
    Chevron (CVX) 138     2008
    Coca-Cola (KO) 113     1987
    Cisco (CSCO) 112     2009
    Pfizer (PFE) 100     2004
    Intel (INTC)   91     1999

  • Manage Your Borrowing and Avoid Debt Negotiators

    Debt Negotiators May Give Little Relief to Consumers

    “They never told me that the money I was paying wasn’t going to my debt, it was going to them,” said Hopkins, 59, who quit work in January 2008 after a brain tumor led to surgery. He now receives $1,539 a month in disability checks. “You are better on your own.”

    Credit-card delinquencies are at record highs, according to Fitch Ratings, and the U.S. unemployment rate of 8.9 percent is the highest since 1983. As more consumers fall behind on bills, settlement companies often end up adding to the debt burden rather than offering a cost-saving solution, said Gail Cunningham, a spokeswoman for the National Foundation for Credit Counseling in Silver Spring, Maryland.
    …
    New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has begun a national investigation of settlement companies, and has sued two for fraud and false advertising. Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan has also filed two lawsuits against debt-settlement companies, alleging they “engage in deceptive marketing practices” and “do little or nothing to improve consumers’ financial standings.” Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott sued a debt settlement company in March, saying it engaged in “deceptive and misleading acts,” according to court documents.

    It is much better to avoid this problem by taking wise personal finance actions – don’t take on personal debt for minor purchases (for a mortgage then debt is fine, probably fine for a car – though avoid debt if you can). The “secret” is not very secret. Just don’t buy what you can’t pay for. It is very simple, many people just don’t want to follow that simple strategy. Also save money in an emergency fund, so when some emergency comes along you don’t go into debt. You just use your emergency fund.

    Once you are stuck in a bad situation with more debt than you can afford to pay back you have bad choices. Obviously many try to take advantage of you. Frankly they realize many that are stuck in bad financial position make bad financial decisions. Therefor it is a good place for those trying to rip people off to find people to take advantage of. The best way to deal with this is not to try and find the best debt negotiators it is to manage you finances well and not get in trouble.

    Related: Personal Saving and Personal Debt in the USA – How to Use a Credit Card Successfully – Credit Card Companies Willing to Deal Over Debt – Where to Keep Your Emergency Funds? – Americans are Drowning in Debt

  • Manufacturing Cars in the USA

    The current economic climate is very bad and all car manufacturing in the USA has declined in the last 2 years. But the longer term trend is that foreign companies are manufacturing more and more here while the USA companies fail to. This year it is likely the “big three” will manufacture fewer than 50% of the cars manufactured in the USA (the “big three” have more production in Canada and Mexico than the “foreign” companies do).

    They Can Build Them; Why Can’t We?

    non-U.S. automakers are still building U.S. factories. Volkswagen is erecting an assembly plant in Tennessee, Kia Motors has a plant going up in Georgia, and Toyota Motor is putting one up in Mississippi, although it has delayed opening there because of the slump in auto sales. Foreign auto manufacturers and suppliers already have a massive presence in the U.S.
    …
    This transplant industry is replacing Detroit’s manufacturing. Through mid May, all North American assembly plants (including Canada and Mexico) have built 2.77 million cars and light trucks, half the production level of the year-earlier period. Of these, Detroit’s Big Three have built only 1.5 million of these vehicles, just 268,000 more than the transplants.
    …
    Toyota took over a badly managed GM plant in California; it was a joint venture, but the Japanese ran the plant. GM sent young executives to work there and learn Toyota’s manufacturing and quality techniques. They learned, but when they came back to GM, the GM bureaucracy would not change its ways.

    Read about the joint Toyota – GM plant: Remembering NUMMI. The problems of GM, Ford and Chrysler are due mainly to long term failures or management. It is not impossible to manufacture in the USA. But it is difficult to maintain poor management systems, without overpaid executives when others manage better and don’t take so much of the profits into their own pockets.

    Related: posts on manufacturing – Big Failed Three, Meet the Successful Eight – Leading Manufacturing Countries in 2007 – Honda has Never had Layoffs and has been Profitable Every Year – People: Team Members or Costs

  • Is Productivity Growth Bad?

    Why Rising Productivity Is Cause for Worry

    But history also tells us something else: Massive economic disruptions are typically accompanied by weak or negative productivity growth, because businesses have trouble raising money and operating efficiently. Output per hour stagnated in the two deepest postwar recessions, 1974-75 and 1981-82. During the worst of the Great Depression, 1929 to 1933, productivity plunged.
    …
    But there may be another, less benign, reason for rising productivity. In past downturns, educated professionals have escaped mainly unscathed. This time businesses are relentlessly hacking at their professional workforce—a tactic that boosts short-term productivity while hurting long-term growth. Rising productivity may be a sign of weakness, not strength.

    Over the past year the number of employed professionals has fallen by 0.7%, a rare decline. Outside of the still-growing education and health-care occupations, the number of employed professionals has dropped by a dramatic 3.6%.

    Cutting productive staff for short term rewards is definitely a negative for long term productivity. My guess is the management ranks are not as productive as the non-management ranks are however. My sense is their is more room to eliminate non-value added activity from management positions which will not harm long term productivity growth.

    A good way to improve productivity is to reduce excessive pay for senior executives. As the money wasted on exorbitant pay that senior executives lavish on themselves is reduced the capital wasted on them can be better deployed in ways that will improve productivity.

    Related: The Real Threat Is Decreased Productivity – Manufacturing Productivity (data accuracy) – Manufacturing Contracting Globally
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  • Home Prices Fall by Record 19%

    Home prices fall by record 19.1 percent in 1Q

    The National Index, which is released quarterly and covers a broader area than the monthly 20- and 10-city indexes, posted a 19% drop in the first quarter from a year earlier and a 7.5% decline from the fourth quarter.
    …
    New York still is up 73.4% from January 2000, though down 19.7% from its June 2006 peak. The Detroit index is 29% lower than in January 2000. Detroit home prices are back to their mid-1995 levels.

    Phoenix, Las Vegas and San Francisco continued to lead year-over-year decliners, with drops over 30%. Minneapolis led month-to-month decliners, as the rate of decline accelerated there. The rates of decline also accelerated in Boston, Detroit, Las Vegas, Miami, New York, Portland, San Diego and Seattle.

    Dallas, Denver, Cleveland, Boston and Charlotte managed to avoid double-digit year-over-year declines. Measuring from each market’s peak, Dallas has suffered the least, down 11.1% from its peak in June 2007; while Phoenix is down 53% from its peak in June of 2006. All of the 20 metro areas are in double digit declines from their peaks, with two — Phoenix and Las Vegas — in excess of 50%.

    Related: Home Price Declines Exceeding 10% Seen for 20% of Housing Markets (Sep 2007) – Nearly 10% of Mortgages Delinquent or in Foreclosure – Record Home Price Declines (Sep 2008)

  • Growing Crude Storage in China

    Growing Crude Storage in China

    “Our analysis confirms that tanker capacity arrivals into China have spiked up in recent months, in line with imports, but more importantly, tanker arrivals into Strategic Petroleum Reserve ports have increased materially,” Bernstein says
    …
    Bernstein estimates that the amount of crude entering the SPR ports in China—the world’s second biggest oil consumer after the U.S.–has increased by around 400,000 barrels a day since November, based on its assessment using the satellite imaging services of Google, the search engine company.
    …
    There’s likely more to come. Bernstein says satellite images show a marked increase in oil-storage construction over the past few years and estimates that China’s number of days of forward demand–a gauge of oil storage–amount to just 28 days of imports and 14 days of total demand.

    China is targeting storage capacity that will hold demand cover of around 90 days. (The U.S. currently has storage for about 62 days of oil imports.) In other words, there’s a lot more oil still to be packed away in China now and in the coming years as more facilities are built.

    This is another smart move by China, in my opinion. With the huge amount of cash they are holding, I would rather hold more of it as crude than dollars. And stockpiling the crude also protects the domestic demand from supply shocks. I would also take other steps they are taking, like investing heavily in adding wind power capacity.

    Related: I Wouldn’t Sell Oil at These Prices – Who Will Buy All the USA’s Debt? – Oil Consumption by Country – South Korea To Invest $22 Billion in Overseas Energy Projects

  • Deficit Threat from Health Care Costs

    Economist blog post on Health care:

    Peter Orszag reminds us that the real deficit threat comes not from bail-outs, wars, or Social Security, but from health care. Medicare is set to become a drain on federal finances by 2017. If health-care costs continue to grow at the same rate, the cost of Medicare and Medicaid will be 20% of GDP by 2050. American health care is a model of inefficiency; there appears to be little correlation between spending and outcomes.
    …
    In hindsight there seems something rather perverse about only providing the best care to retired workers. In theory, the government should make private insurance cheaper for everyone else because then the young won’t have to subsidise (at least through their health-care premiums) the old. The main problem, which European countries have learned, is that sustainable, government-provided care and timely access to the most innovative treatments tends to be mutually exclusive.

    Related: Many Experts Say Health-Care System Inefficient, Wasteful – Improving the Health Care System – USA Spent $2.2 Trillion, 16.2% of GDP, on Health Care in 2007

  • Bogle on the Retirement Crisis

    John Bogle was the founder of Vanguard Group and a well respected investment mind. He has written several good books including: The Little Book of Common Sense Investing, Common Sense on Mutual Funds and Bogle on Mutual Funds. This interview from 2006 discusses the state of the retirement system, before the credit crisis.

    John Bogle: The whole retirement system, in fact, in the country is in, I think, very poor shape, and it’s going to be the next big financial crisis in the country, I honestly believe. … The private pension plans are underfunded by an estimated $400 billion, and the state and local government plans are underfunded by an estimated $800 billion. That’s a $1.2 trillion shortfall between the assets the plans have and the liabilities they will have to the pensioners as they pay out their retirement checks over the rest of their lifetimes.

    Frontline: How do they get away with that? Don’t they have to fund them?

    John Bogle: No, they don’t, because a lot of it is based on assumptions. Our corporations are now assuming that future returns in their pension plan will be about 8.5 percent per year, and that’s not going to happen. The future returns in the bond market will be about 4.5 percent, and maybe if we’re lucky 7.5 percent on stocks. Call it a 6 percent return — before you deduct the cost of investing all that money, the turnover cost, the management fees. So maybe a 5 percent return is going to be possible, in my judgment, and they are estimating 8.5 percent.

    Why? Because when they do it that way, corporation earnings become greatly overstated, and all the executives get nice, big bonuses. They are using pension plan assumptions as a way to manage corporate earnings and meet the expectations of Wall Street.

    Frontline: So if a company overstates the value of its pension plan assets, it makes the company look better to Wall Street, so there’s an incentive to kind of exaggerate, if not cheat.

    John Bogle: That is precisely correct. And let me clear on the cheating: It’s legal cheating; it’s not illegal cheating. In other words, you can change any reasonable set of numbers — and corporations have done this, have raised the pension assumption from 7 percent to 8.5 percent — and all of a sudden that corporation will report an earnings gain for the year rather than an earnings loss that they would otherwise have. Simple, legal.

    The entire PBS series (from 2006) on 401(k)s (including interviews with Elizabeth Warren, David Wray and Alicia Munnell) is worth reading.

    In February of 2009 he spoke to the House of Representatives committee exploring retirement security.
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  • Indian Stock Market up 17% Today

    The Indian stock market surged 17% today on the election results that gave the Congress party an unexpectedly decisive victory. The market was closed early due to the huge spike in prices. The Indian stock market was up 26% this year, before the move today.

    Landslide in India Vote Reshapes Landscape

    Students of Indian politics pointed to several factors. First, under Mrs. Gandhi’s leadership, the Congress-led coalition homed in on the rural poor. During its first term, buoyed by robust economic growth, it used record government revenues to increase social spending, not just raising health and education budgets, but also starting an ambitious public works program in the countryside and a costly loan repayment waiver for farmers.
    …
    Even with a free hand, the Congress-led government will face formidable challenges. India needs to swiftly build roads, highways and power plants; improve public schools and build universities for a swelling young population; and hire nurses and doctors for its feeble public health system. Most of all, it needs to address its abiding poverty. Despite over a decade of high economic growth in India, 300 million people remain below the poverty line.

    Driving India’s Economic Reforms

    The problem is that revenue growth is now collapsing in the wake of the economic slowdown, while well-entrenched government spending is increasing. India’s fiscal deficit has ballooned to more than 10% of GDP this year and the debt-to-GDP ratio is at 80% — the highest for any major developing country.

    India has great potential and great problems. India has poor physical infrastructure and crippling bureaucracy; India ranked the 122nd easiest country for doing business. The election results are giving investors hope the government will be able to make progress to improve the business climate, which will improve economic performance.

    Related: Emerging-market Multinationals – Why Investing is Safer Overseas (Jun 2007) – World’s Wealthiest People – Top 12 Manufacturing Countries in 2007

  • Can unemployment claims predict the end of the American recession?

    Can unemployment claims predict the end of the American recession? by Robert J. Gordon

    Since economists are notoriously poor at forecasting turning points, this hope is likely to be dismissed as a will o’ the wisp. But is it wisely dismissed? Recently I have discovered a surprisingly tight historical relationship in past US recessions between the cyclical peak in new claims for unemployment insurance (measured as a four-week moving average) and the subsequent NBER trough.
    …
    To this point I have examined a single indicator to see if it is useful in predicting the end of recessions without any consideration of what is going on in the rest of the economy. Our conclusion is supported by the fact that previous false peaks occurred when new claims were at 80 to 90% of the level at the ultimate true peak. For the peak of 4 April 2009 to be false by this historical precedent, the ultimate future peak would have to be in the range of 730,000 to 800,000. As the weeks go by, such a sharp future increase in new claims looks increasingly implausible.
    …
    My reasoning leads me to conclude that the ultimate NBER trough of the current business cycle is likely to occur in May or June 2009, substantially earlier than is currently predicted by many professional forecasters.

    Interesting points. Time will tell what happens. I am skeptical this measure alone will prove to be perfect but I can believe it will be one useful measure to consider. I tend to be skeptical we are close to a strong recovery. But at what point the economy moves out of a recession is less certain. I still believe we will be lucky if we show job gains by the end of this year.

    Related: How Much Worse Can the Mortgage Crisis Get? (March 2008) – Unemployment Rate Increased to 8.9% – Manufacturing Employment Data – 1979 to 2007 – First Quarter 2009 GDP down 6.1% – Poll: 60% say Depression Likely (Oct 2008)