2035CRASH

Published by Mr. Contrarian

Post a comment . Feb 07, 2009
Filed under: Uncategorized

Published by Mr. Contrarian

1 Comment . Feb 02, 2009
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Published by Mr. Contrarian

1 Comment . Jan 20, 2009
Filed under: Energy, Technical Analysis, Energy, HEU

Published by Mr. Contrarian

There are past successes at GM.  The relative success of GM’s Europe and Asian subsidiaries shows that.  One such article from three years ago shows that GM, given the correct direction, can indeed make small efficient vehicles that people want to buy.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/08/08/business/van.php

Unfortunately, it chose to continue researching, developing, producing, and selling behemoth guzzlers that no one wanted when fuel prices inevitably climbed higher.  Were they thinking $1/gallon gas was coming back?

Bad management should not be bailed out.  GM should be allowed to go bankrupt, and a stronger domestic car industry will be reborn out of the ashes of the current failed business model.

Post a comment . Nov 23, 2008
Filed under: Automotive, Changing business models, bankruptcy, Big Three, Chrysler, domestic three, Ford, General Motors, GM

Published by Mr. Contrarian

It looks like i’m not the only guy to have figured out that the world works in cycles.  Just look at the fashion industry—bell-bottoms have come and gone……….and come again.  I’ve seen acid-wash jeans twice now.  What’s next?–shoulder pads for womens’ jackets again?

Patrick Bedard is one of the old-hands at Car&Driver.  This is one smart guy, but he uses his brain.  It comes from his engineering background, and I’ve always enjoyed his editorials, now for the past twenty-five years. 

When muscle cars were all the rage in the 70s, he kept his wallet closed.  When muscle cars couldn’t be given away in 1980, he stepped up to the plate and bought himself a cherry example of a now-classic  American hot-rod.  He still has that car, and that was almost thirty years ago.

He alludes to inflationary cycles and “the twenty-year rule of pop cycle fads” in this recent column of his:

http://www.caranddriver.com/features/columns/c_d_staff/patrick_bedard/
lifeboats_for_rising_inflation_column

Among collectors of pop culture, there’s a “20-year rule,” which holds that things 20 years old have been out of fashion long enough to be interesting again. Kinney said he hadn’t heard that applied to cars, but 20 years is about the time depreciation bottoms out and cars reach a low point on the price curve.

Is there a Dow Jones index for collector cars? Not a proven one like the Dow, but this past summer, Cars That Matter created seven indexes, each relating to a different category of cars, using values from its past issues back to 2006. At the top end, Kinney’s “Blue Chip” index includes 25 sought-after cars that average more than $1 million. The “Small Cap” index illustrates the other end of the market: a dozen cars under 25 large.

Now this is key.  Here he is putting together disparate sources of information and gleaning a pattern.  the Dow Jones (DJIA).  cycles of in and out, and collector car values.   Obviously, this is a pretty observant guy.

As for cars that are so far “out” that they come back “in”, a good example is the 1977 Firebird TransAm as publicized in the movie, “Smokey and the Bandit”.  The movie’s 30-year anniversary was last year, and the wild talk on the street was that mint-condition vehicles of the same make/model as in the movie would be good investments, irrespective of the Burt Reynolds cheese-connection. 

http://www.iwaynet.net/~gl&lisk/1977ta.html

Any good theory should be simple, and explain a variety of phenomena, if not all of them.   Prices and demand for muscle cars bottomed in the early 80s, a period corresponding with very expensive fuel, and sky-high interest rates.  IF that is coming back in 2035, then it shouldn’t surprise you that I have already started compiling a shopping list of cars that might interest me when the bottom falls out at the next inflationary bust.

Post a comment . Nov 23, 2008
Filed under: Automotive, Pop Culture, long-term cycles, collector cars, depreciation, fads, in-fashion, inflation, market trends, muscle cars, out-of-fashion, Patrick Bedard, Pop Culture

Published by Mr. Contrarian

The one thing we don’t have in the developed world, is corruption.  Having spoken with people who have sold everything and moved to Canada, the one thing they comment on (for example, back in the Phillipines) is the rampant corruption that exists.

This is a mentality that is much like democracy, or the lack of it.  We have just gone thru countless elections here in North America.  Regardless of whether your candidate won or lost, not one life was lost or even threatened.  The transition of power occurs relatively peacefully, except for a few lawn signs being torn down.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRE2eIdYRtY

Viewing one minute in an Iraqi intersection, one can see how the war in Iraq is essentially unwinnable.  it will take generations for folks such as this to proceed through an intersection in an organized manner, let alone embrace democracy and an absence of corruption.  Bringing about change to the perceptions of the average citizen in both Iraq and many other developing countries, will take much longer, and will only be successful from the inside out.

Unfortunately, change brought about by outsiders is doomed to fail.

Post a comment . Nov 23, 2008
Filed under: Politics, long-term cycles, chaos, corruption, democracy, Iraq

Published by Mr. Contrarian

Approximately five years ago, i read an article of how one researcher was applying wave theory to traffic jams.  The simple premise being that traffic jams could be define with a formula describing a wave.  This is a micro-example of my premise being that long-term economic forces shape human behaviours and thoughts over a period of several decades.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Suugn-p5C1M&eurl=http://bmmullen.blogspot.com/2008/03/traffic-wave-theory.html

The premise of this blog is that economic forces and biases cause people to “speed up” (for example, buy things when interest rates are lower) and “slow down”  (when they feel insecure and/or have less disposable income).  These actions can be applied to short-term phenomena (ie. traffic behaviour) and also longer-term phenomena, over a lifetime.

Post a comment . Nov 23, 2008
Filed under: Automotive, long-term cycles, economic cycle, economic wave, Traffic, traffic jams, wave-theory

Published by Mr. Contrarian

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/localnews/stories/DN-jfkfade_22met.ART.State.Edition2.4a60df2.html

Yesterday was the 45th anniversary of the assassination of JFK in Dallas.  Networks aired the 1991 feature film “JFK” by Oliver Stone.  I remember when it was released that it was draped in controversy, and accused of being a less-than-accurate rendition of what really happened.   To this day, I don’t think anyone really knows what happened, if they did—they’re not telling anyone. 

It could be argued that assassinations could happen at any time.  But I would argue that they happen at inflection points in history, probably just after them.  These could be political, societal, and most definitely economic.  I’m hard-pressed to classify the shooting of John Lennon, but JFK, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and even Ronald Reagan.

Interest rates are an indicator of the “global risk premium”—inflationary times reflect destabilizing times.  And it is in those periods that I would argue that assassinations are more likely to appear.

Think of the general political stability that ensued in the deflationary period from 1981-2002.  Even the terrorists went soft.  The Iron Curtain fell.  Peace was everywhere and it could be argued that politicians didnt’ want to rock the boat.   It is “well-known” that Bill Clinton had the opportunity to “remove, eliminate, or take-out” Osama Bin Laden through the latter 1990s, but refused to for not wanting to create political fall-out. 

http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2001/12/5/153637.shtml

This decision, made late in the secure years of the deflationary era, set the stage for the USA’s complacency leading up to the disaster of 9/11.  If this in fact is the truth, I find it disgraceful that people continue to hold up Bill Clinton on a pedastel, paying money to hear him speak, and denigrating his successor (George W. Bush, whatever you may think of him).  Like it or not, George W. Bush and his terms’ problems can likely be laid mostly at the feet of two individuals—Bill Clinton (for Osama Bin Laden) and Alan Greenspan (for the foundation laid in the 1990s that led to the economic bubble).

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4540958/

We are coming out of an inflection point.  It is generally accepted that the 2001-2008 period will mark the transition from Deflation to Inflation.  What does this bode?

Generalized world instability on all fronts.  Food supply, energy supply, water supply.  Political and economic instability.  A rise in political tensions and a decline in US influence and control.  And for all you anti-Americans out there, this isn’t a knock against the US—remember the failed US hostage rescue in Tehran of 1979?  This is a direct result of inflationary forces driving up the nominal and real cost of resources such as oil, which tend to be in the control of organizations that don’t like “us” in the developed world.

Now, my search for “JFK assassination” pulled up 1.41M links on Google.  I know it has been written about, but little did I realize that “Obama assassination” pulled up over twice that many links, 2.84M links.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/
ALeqM5g5WM84SXYr2c54O1B0AuUVfg_p9Q

History doesnt’ repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme.  Let’s hope we don’t go down this road again, but I would argue that much of this is already “baked into the cake” and large-scale economic forces dictate the mass-actions of general populations. 

If we are indeed in the early stages of an inflationary period going into 2035, then tighten your seat-belts—from what I have read, the 60s and 70s were not a fun time to be around if you enjoyed the status quo.

3 Comments . Nov 23, 2008
Filed under: Politics, Pop Culture, long-term cycles, Al-Quieda, assassination, Bill Clinton, black ops, CIA, Dallas, George W. Bush, inflation, inflection point, JFK, John F. Kennedy, John Lennon, Kennedy, Lennon, Martin King, Martin Luther King, Obama, Oliver Stone, Osama Bin Laden, Robert Kennedy, Ronald Reagan

Published by Mr. Contrarian

The new urbanism is spoken about frequently, in the same breath as Vancouver.  It is more than real-estate and shiny new condos, it also includes all the little things that have been part of Vancouver for a much longer period of time.

This just-published article delves into some of the challenges experienced by other cities as they try to replicate the success of Vancouver, and touches on the mix of variables that Vancouver was blessed with.

http://www.vanmag.com/News_and_Features/Larry_Beasleys_Simple_Plan

To the naysayers that say “everything is overpriced and prices must come down”, that may be true in the very short-term due to the global deleveraging we are seeing (and feeling) but if in fact there is a long-term inflationary cycle that will manifest until 2035, the local property market (and that of any other area that benefits from inflation) will rise further, farther, as faster than anyone ever dreamed possible.  The experience of the 1960s and 1970s indicates it must.

1 Comment . Nov 23, 2008
Filed under: Real Estate, Abu Dhabi, Ecodensity, Larry Beasley, Michael White, Real Estate, Vancouver, Vancouver magazine

Published by Mr. Contrarian

Students of history will recall that after Japan attacked Pearl Harbour, the US industrial machine mobilized from its depression-induced coma, and pulled out all stops in the production of all sorts of military machinery and equipment.   During the Remembrance Day holiday two weeks ago, I watched a TV special that stated the auto-production apparatus of the former Big Three of GM, Ford, & Chrysler was converted to military production.  Tanks, and military vehicles aren’t that much different than cranking out Hummers.  And where do you think the Jeep came from?  Also, it was stated that a 17 acre Ford plant was converted to around-the-clock production of the B-17 Flying Fortress long-range bomber.  Production was of such quantity, that they were rolling off the production line at the rate of approx. twenty per day. 

Now,  let’s fast forward to the present day.  Who are the up-and-coming world powers competing with the US for a presence on the world stage?  Well, China, for one.

So, let’s say any of the Domestic Three declare bankruptcy.  People still need to buy cars.  Other manufacturers will buy selected assets to add to their own corporate production facilities, if the price is right.   Plants may or may not be shuttered.  A sale of the entire company, to a foreign company or country for that matter, is something else entirely.

There are possible future military implications.  If the US became engaged in a limited or even full-blown military confrontation with the Chinese, or even an ally of the Chinese, would a Chinese-controlled GM be willing to continue supplying the US military with machinery? 

I put forth that these are the types of questions that the real powers that be in Washington are bandying about—the CIA presenting scenarios of how military production and expertise might be affected or inadvertently exported in the event control of GM or equivalent, is passed to a foreign company or country.

Students of history will know that World War I precipited the events of the Great Depression of the 1930s.  And the austerity of the depression and crushing war repayments contributed to the rise of Hitler, and the subsequent onset of WW2.   I believe that regional and global conflict has roots in economic and societyal unrest, something that works in long-term cycles.  Small-scale skirmishes and even WW3 is inevitable at some point, and I am sure the powers that be in Washington are considering the future military ramifications of a Chinese-controlled General Motors.

Industrial might results in military might.  The vauted US military fighting machine may soon be at the mercy of the industrial apparatus of a foreign power.  GM may be one small part of a long-term trend that is seeing the gradual industrial disembowelment of the United States.

Post a comment . Nov 21, 2008
Filed under: Automotive, Politics, long-term cycles, china, GM, industrial capacity, military, US Military