evince
Truthmatters
http://www.plenglish.com/article.asp?ID={52F75A61-4FAB-4D67-9E6B-D1ECE6E456A0}&language=EN
This guy says by next week.
This guy says by next week.
160 a barrel?
- Thread starter evince
- Start date
Of course, the message board “economist” now shows that we can add not knowing what 160 dollar a barrel oil would do to the economy (food prices alone) to all of the other things he knows nothing about, but opines on anyway.
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The Almighty
I agree with pretty much everything he stated. Though $160 by next week is a pretty agressive statement. I do think we will see oil in the $150-160 range this summer.
The upward pressure on oil prices is a large reason so many solar companies have seen their stock soar over the past couple of weeks.
Top is correct in that it will push investment into alt energy at a faster clip and that the fair price for oil is closer to $160 than it is to current levels.
From an economic standpoint, this means we are going to see a huge push towards more fuel efficient cars and away from the gas guzzlers. Which is a large reason that Toyota, Nissan, Honda are all doing well while Ford and GM are trying to figure out how they screwed the pooch yet again.
uscitizen
Villified User
GM and ford deserve to die, this is the second major screwing of the pooch for them. they cannot run a company. I do feel sorry for their workers though and am sure their execs will retire very very comfortably while the PGC picks up the tab for their working retirees benefits at a reduced rate for the retirees.
Good Luck
New member
It's funny how people blame U.S. auto companies for manufacturing the big trucks they erroneously label "SUV". Who has been buying those trucks and demanding more? What were our car manufacturers supposed to do when the public was demanding larger vehicles?
Were they supposed act like our mothers and tell us "no, dears, those big vehicles will only hurt us in the end. Here is a nice mechanized rollerskate for you to haul your soccer teams around in. But you'll have to buy eight of them to fit everything."
It is not the fault of the car manufacturers for providing what J.Q. Public wanted. Foreign manufacturers even sent us their larger vehicles, while keeping the smaller, fuel efficient ones because Japan and the like have long had much higher gas prices than we face now. So J.Q. Public is the ones to blame. GM screwed no one. They gave the consumer what the consumer demanded.
Now the consumer realizes they went a bit overboard by wanting a big 4WD truck when a decent minivan would have sufficed. And, typical of our current society, rather than look in the mirror for the cause of the trouble, they gotta blame someone else.
Were they supposed act like our mothers and tell us "no, dears, those big vehicles will only hurt us in the end. Here is a nice mechanized rollerskate for you to haul your soccer teams around in. But you'll have to buy eight of them to fit everything."
It is not the fault of the car manufacturers for providing what J.Q. Public wanted. Foreign manufacturers even sent us their larger vehicles, while keeping the smaller, fuel efficient ones because Japan and the like have long had much higher gas prices than we face now. So J.Q. Public is the ones to blame. GM screwed no one. They gave the consumer what the consumer demanded.
Now the consumer realizes they went a bit overboard by wanting a big 4WD truck when a decent minivan would have sufficed. And, typical of our current society, rather than look in the mirror for the cause of the trouble, they gotta blame someone else.
charver
You lookin' at my pint?
I'm sure the American consumer did have some part to play but you'd think that, in exchange for a fat wad of cash deposited in the bank of their choice every month, the ladies and gentlemen at the head of a multi-national auto-mobile manufacturing organization would be capable of working out that hoping against hope that an increasingly scarce resource wouldn't rise in price might be seen in some quarters as a little reckless, no?
Why bother planning ahead when you can just blame the consumer for the mess you find yourself in?
uscitizen
Villified User
And who creates the demand for these vehicles ? The auto industry with their commercials for the most part becuase their profit margin was much higher on a per vehicle basis.
for the most part we Americans do what the tube tells us to.
Good Luck
New member
So the auto companies just randomly decided big trucks were the thing to sell? Give me a break. Consumer demand is not created by television commercials.
Starting in the mid 80s, people were buying the largest versions of the SUV line in greater numbers than the smaller versions. So the car companies looked at that fact, and started making more of the larger versions, plus added an larger model to the line. Then people started buying the bigger one, so the next year the car companies increased the size more, which also sold. After 10 years of this, and the "Sport Utility Vehicle", which had started in the 80's a a souped up 4WD medium station wagon, evolved into a big frame 4WD truck, the epitomy being the infamous Hummer.
Now you can go ahead and blame the auto companies for giving in to consumer demand rather than doing the "correct" thing and looking ahead to the days of expensive gasoline. Or you can admit to the reality that if GM hadn't made their SUV's bigger, they would have lost sales to those companies (which include Toyota, Subaru, Honda, etc.) that did make them bigger.
Epicurus
Reasonable
Haha what a fucking moron.
Seriously I should pay for you to take a community college economics class or something.
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The Almighty
To an extent you are correct in that advertising works, otherwise no one would do it. However, to suggest it is the fault of the auto companies for the US consumers decisions is ridiculous. They advertise their smaller vehicles as well.... it is the mindset of Americans that they want everything bigger and better.... TVs, Homes, Vehicles etc.... THAT is what drives the sales.
The constant blaming of corporations for the decisions made by individuals is pathetic. It is like Desh's constant need to blame the lenders and not the borrowers for the mess we are in within the finance sector. It is a sad attempt to divert personal responsibility onto the corporations.... because THAT is the lefty way.
This is not to say the corporations have not played a part as well. But enough of using the "evil corporations" as the scapegoat. It is pathetic and beneath you.
I have to disagree with you and
Epicurus....I was in business for a couple of decades and worked for 3 Major Usa Corporations...and during this time period, one of the calculations that we often used in our analysis of our business, was the dollars per square foot that we were making in each of our stores.... in the space that each one of our stores had, including the stock space it took to house the product off of the "showroom" floor....or the display floor in a dept store.
If your space is limited, then dollars per square foot is a very important measure and a measure that you want to RISE.....
Why? Because if your space is limited, and you can only show a consumer so much product, yet you wanted to increase your sales, there are only two ways to do this...
One- Is turning your merchandise faster.
This means that you keep prices about the same....with lower end product, and you try to sell a hell of alot more of them a month to come out with beating your sales of the previous year....(And this is difficult to do, because your space is LIMITED so you DO NOT have the stock space to own or stock all of these cheaper cars that you would need to sell to beat last year...every inch of your floor and stock space matters...)
Or
Two- Take the easier approach and focus your customer on the higher end product, that sits on the same amount of floor space, (showroom for a car dealer) and stock space (parking lot of the dealership).....
Instead of having $12k autos, you have $25k autos sitting and using about the same amount of space.... You only need to sell half the amount of these $25k autos to give you the same sales as the $12k autos, using the SAME amount of property....and limited property at that....
So, we used to focus at all of my jobs, on "upgrading" the customer in to a higher priced product. I was in the shoe business, so if a customer asked for a certain product, we had a rule to have the sales person bring out the shoe the customer wanted, AND AN UPGRADED, similar, but Designer product, at a much higher price....about every tenth customer went for it....the upgrade but some stores had it down where every three customers out of ten would buy the upgrade and other stores where you could tell the sales people did not follow the mandate to bring an upgrade out too, with what the customer wanted sold no upgrades.
Just simple things like this can make or break a business... we HAD NO MORE SPACE, we leased spaces in department stores and they refused to give us more of it...the only way for us to do better, was to increase how much we could sell with the limited space we had and selling the "SUV" would have been the more profitable route to go...
Bottom Line
The car industry most certainly makes more off of an SUV than a car in more ways than one, and they would be foolish as business people to ignore this and not have this in their business plan to increase....so this is why i disagree with your dismissal of such.
And yes demand has alot to do with it, I do agree...but supply does also, and so does the focus of the industry that supplies us...the marketing and advertising that does CREATE the demand...its a multi billion dollar business...marketing and advertising....every corporation has a huge marketing staff, they are part of every product development meeting!
Care
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