Toyota hits rocky road.

A global economic meltdown has sent auto sales tumbling 32 percent in October alone, which could shake the entire auto industry to its core.
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Toyota's stock nosedived 17 percent last week -- its greatest decline in 18 years -- after the company announced it will see an operating profit of just $6.9 billion, a 73.6 percent decline over last year. That's far worse than expected, and it underscores not only the dismal state of the domestic auto market but some strategic mistakes Toyota made on its way to becoming the biggest automaker in the world. Wired

Comparisons from the New York Times :

*G.M. has well over $200 billion of debt. Most of this is on the books of its financing arm and is matched by money that buyers of G.M. cars owe the company. But as any banker knows, not all of that money will be paid back.

* G.M. also has huge pension liabilities while Toyota has much smaller pension obligations because it hasn't been around long enough in the United States to generate a large population of retirees, who consume medical services in greater quantity than younger, healthier workers. Toyota's U.S. manufacturing operations have fewer than 100 retirees. GM, by contrast, has 422,000 retirees and surviving spouses, compared with 170,000 active employees.

* Toyota's medical plans in the United States cover 15,000 manufacturing workers and their dependents. GM's medical plans in the United States cover 1.1 million workers, retirees and dependents at a cost of $5.2 billion last year. Last week GM predicted that costs would rise to $5.6 billion this year, almost an 8 percent increase. GM said that amount added about $1,400 to the cost of each vehicle sold in the United States.

"I wouldn't be surprised if it cost GM $3,000 more to produce a car than Toyota, and it's probably almost all health care and pension costs," said David Healy, an analyst at Burnham Securities.

Auto executives in Detroit are not crying wolf over the dangers of rising health care costs. GM, Ford and Chrysler are not posting nearly the profits they need even amid healthy sales, in order to renew their models and retool factories.

The [North American Free Trade Agreement(NAFTA) was signed in December 1993 but did not come into effect until January 1, 1994.

As of 2007 the trade bloc was the largest in the world and one of the most powerful, wide-reaching treaties in the world. From 1994 to 2007, net manufacturing employment has declined by 3,654,000, and during this period several other free trade agreements

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Comments

health costs

Those are incredible numbers and if the United States would confront these profit sucking health care and insurance industry as well as the inefficiencies we might get even close to other nation's health care costs.

The talking heads always talk about the expense and ignore the fact that the United States health care makes this country much less competitive for companies to operate in.
Either they let their workers take the prayer plan, which can also cost in terms of sick employees or they pay out the ass to subsidize the private health care and insurance industry.

While I still believe GM, Ford, Chrysler are stuck on stupid in management, on the health care benefits score they are telling the truth. So what does that say, any corporations who provides decent benefits will end up subsidizing another industry to the point of ruin as that company matures and their workers retire?

(you formmatted your links! Yea!)

Not bad for a self taught htmler, eh?

They're asking for another four years -- in a just world, they'd get 10 to 20 ~~ Dennis Kucinich

For all of those with XHTML disability

;) I try to put a host of tools on here to help. You can always email me for more help. While I can't format everybody's stuff all of the time, I do add a lot of tools and info. It's in the user guide to the right and in the admin forum (click discussion and scroll down to admin)

Yeah, formatting links is probably #1 and #2 is formatting images. Got those two down you're rockin'.

Tables are the worse nightmare, even when you know what you're doing. It's like some sort of tag accounting hell hole to format a table.

I think some are using Microsoft live writer which I mention in the forum how to use that.

Any other technical requests if I can set it up, I'll be happy to do it.

I do have a spell checker in the rich text editor and Firefox 3.x automatically has a spell checker, IE 7 has a spell checker add on.

For those with grammar and spelling disability, which is myself included, these are a God send.