LKY come suck my toes Economic Recovery!

[Lee_Gong_Yaw]

Obama have to prepare to dump in yet another few hundred billions to be burnt by these failing US industries. Recovery as LKY claimed, my ass! Ask LKY to suck my toes!

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091116...Ec2VjA3luX3RvcF9zdG9yeQRzbGsDZ21yZXBvcnRzMTJi


GM reports $1.2B loss, says it shows progress
AP

GM CEO on Govt. Repayment, Q3 Results Play Video CNBC – GM CEO on Govt. Repayment, Q3 Results

* Jake Tapper on GM's Overseas Ventures Play Video Video:Jake Tapper on GM's Overseas Ventures ABC News
* GM to Start Repaying $6.7B to US Govt. Play Video Video:GM to Start Repaying $6.7B to US Govt. CNBC

Related Quotes Symbol Price Change
DLPIV 0.00 0.00
MTLQQ 0.00 0.00
^GSPC 1,101.13 +7.65
General Motors Corp. President and CEO Fritz Henderson speaks during a news AP – General Motors Corp. President and CEO Fritz Henderson speaks during a news conference at company headquarters …
By TOM KRISHER and DEE-ANN DURBIN, AP Auto Writers Tom Krisher And Dee-ann Durbin, Ap Auto Writers – 5 mins ago

DETROIT – General Motors Co. says it lost $1.2 billion from the time it left bankruptcy protection through Sept. 30, far better than it has reported in previous quarters and a sign that the auto giant is starting to turn around its business.

The company also says it will begin repaying $6.7 billion in U.S. government loans with a $1.2 billion payment in December. It could pay off the full amount by 2010, five years ahead of schedule, but the money will come from funds loaned by the government.

GM said its improved performance was fueled by new products including the Chevrolet Camaro muscle car, and the Chevrolet Equinox and GMC Terrain midsize crossover vehicles. The company's top sellers through October were the Chevrolet Silverado pickup truck and Impala full-size car.

The better showing also reflected lower debt payments. The automaker paid $250 million in interest for the latest period, far lower than in previous quarters when the company was weighed down by a huge debt of almost $95 billion that has since been cut by more than 80 percent.

Also, GM's global presence helped the company, particularly in China, where its sales of 478,000 in the third quarter increased 6 percent over the second quarter.

"We have significantly more work to do, but today's results provide evidence of the solid foundation we are building for the new GM," CEO Fritz Henderson said in a statement.

The company cautioned that the earnings numbers mean little because they don't comply with U.S. accounting standards and cover only the part of the quarter after GM left Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on July 10.

Even more unusual is the $79.4 billion profit the troubled automaker is reporting for the first nine days of the third quarter, when it remained under bankruptcy court protection but was able to scrap colossal amounts of debt and other obligations from its balance sheet.

"Direct comparisons are not necessarily applicable," said Chief Financial Officer Ray Young. "You can make some judgments in terms of trends," Young said.

Nonetheless, GM maintains the numbers show a company making progress, riding dramatically reduced structural costs to a far better performance than the $6 billion loss GM reported in the first quarter, the last full quarter for which its numbers met accounting standards.

GM took in $3.3 billion more cash than it spent for the third quarter, far better than the $10 billion the company burned through during the first quarter.

Its third-quarter revenue totaled $26.4 billion, also an improvement over the first quarter when it saw revenue drop nearly 50 percent from the same period in 2008 to $22.4 billion. Revenue was aided by sales boosts in July and August from the U.S. government's Cash for Clunkers rebates.

GM said its global market share was 11.9 percent in the third quarter, up three percentage points from the first half of the year. The U.S. share stayed flat for the quarter at 19.5 percent.

Many customers stayed away from GM showrooms in the first and second quarters as it headed into bankruptcy protection, fearing the company wouldn't be around to honor warranties and service their vehicles.

Young said GM accountants are in the process of cleaning up the new company's books, revaluing assets and liabilities and changes to pension and health care costs that came from bankruptcy and a new contract with the United Auto Workers union.

GM expects to meet accounting standards when it reports full-year results for fiscal 2009, but those figures probably won't be released until March as accountants go through the complex process of figuring out just how much the company is now worth.

But Young said the third-quarter results still are useful to management in spotting trends and measuring whether the company is making progress.

GM lost $78 billion from 2006 through the first quarter of this year. The gargantuan losses and debt eventually choked the company to the point where it could no longer operate without government help.

GM entered bankruptcy protection with roughly $94.7 billion in debt. It emerged with $17 billion, including the $6.7 billion owed to the U.S. government. The government has given GM a total of $52 billion, including $45.3 billion in exchange for a 61 percent equity stake in the company.

Young said the government placed $16.4 billion of GM's loan money into a contingency fund in case sales worsened or other problems cropped up. Now, GM doesn't need the contingency money and can repay it to the government, he said.

But Henderson said GM felt it was prudent not to repay the whole amount in December, in case conditions change.

The automaker also says it will begin repaying $1.4 billion it owes to the Canadian and Ontario governments in December. The loan repayments will come from escrow accounts set up for the company by the U.S. Treasury Department and Canadian governments. GM also has paid $700 million on a $1.3 billion loan from the German government to keep GM's Opel division in operation. The balance will be repaid this month, GM said.

Henderson said a "reasonably large" part of the Opel repayment came from GM's U.S.-generated funds, while some came from Opel funds, but Henderson said GM is a global company and needs to have flexibility to use the money to run global operations.

The CEO disagreed with a report by the General Accounting Office saying that it was doubtful the U.S. government would recoup all of the money given to GM. He said full repayment is a function of stock value, and he intends to make the stock valuable by managing the company well.

"It is my mission to disprove the GAO," Henderson said.

Young would not detail how much GM paid in interest per quarter before it entered bankruptcy for comparison to the $250 million in interest paid in the latest period, but he said significantly reduced interest payments helped its third-quarter peformance.

Although the company reported positive cash flow for the third quarter, it does not expect that to continue into the fourth quarter because of the government loan repayments and a $2.8 billion payment to help Delphi Corp., its former parts division, out of bankruptcy protection.

GM has said it plans to sell stock to the public late next year so taxpayers can recoup at least part of their remaining investment, though GM Chairman Ed Whitacre said last week the timing of any GM IPO remains uncertain and depends on when the company returns to profitability.

 

[Lee_Gong_Yaw]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091116...Ec2VjA3luX3RvcF9zdG9yeQRzbGsDcmVjZXNzaW9uaW50


Recession intensifies GenX discontent at work
AP


U.S. confidence likely decline into holidays - U.Mich Reuters – A line of job seekers stretches out of a hotel doorway as they wait to enter a Monster.com job fair in …
By MARTHA IRVINE, AP National Writer Martha Irvine, Ap National Writer – 1 hr 25 mins ago

CHICAGO – They're antsy and edgy, tired of waiting for promotion opportunities at work as their elders put off retirement. A good number of them are just waiting for the economy to pick up so they can hop to the next job, find something more fulfilling and get what they think they deserve. Oh, and they want work-life balance, too.

Sounds like Gen Y, the so-called "entitlement generation," right?

Not necessarily, say people who track the generations. In these hard times, they're also hearing strong rumblings of discontent from Generation X. They're the 32- to 44-year-olds who are wedged between baby boomers and their children, often feeling like forgotten middle siblings — and increasingly restless at work as a result.

"All of a sudden, we've gone from being the young upstarts to being the curmudgeons," says Bruce Tulgan, a generational consultant who's written books about various age groups, including his fellow Gen Xers.

This isn't the first time Gen Xers have faced tough times. They came of age during a recession and survived the dot-com bust of 2000. In recent years, though, more members of the generation — stereotyped early on as jaded individualists — had families or began settling down in other ways. It was time, they thought, to enjoy the rewards of paying some dues.

"We were starting to buy into the system, at least to some extent," Tulgan says, "and then we got the rug pulled out from under us."

Now, in this latest recession, nearly two-thirds of baby boomer workers, ages 50 to 61, say they might have to push back their retirement, according to a recent survey from Pew Research.

Meanwhile, on the other end of the age spectrum are Gen Yers, who are often cheaper to hire and heralded for their coveted high-tech knowledge, even though many Gen Xers consider themselves just as technologically savvy.

"It's so annoying," says Lisa Chamberlain, another Gen Xer who wrote the book "Slackonomics: Generation X in the Age of Creative Destruction." "First, it was always the baby boomers overshadowing everything. Then there was this brief period in the mid-'90s where Gen X was cool.

"Now it's, 'What are the new kids doing?' It's like 'Yo, hello, the Google guys are Gen Xers.'"

They can sound a little whiny. But there's also some evidence that Gen Xers really are being taken for granted at work.

One survey done this year for Deloitte Consulting LLP, for instance, found that nearly two-thirds of executives at large companies were most concerned about losing Gen Y employees, while less than half of them had similar concerns about losing Gen Xers.

The assumption is often that Gen Yers are the least loyal and most mobile, says Robin Erickson, a manager with Deloitte's human capital division.

However, she points out that a companion survey of employees found that only about 37 percent of Gen Xers said they planned to stay in their current jobs after the recession ends, compared with 44 percent of Gen Yers, 50 percent of baby boomers and 52 percent of senior citizen workers who said the same.

Everyone surveyed worried about job security. Gen X and Gen Y were most likely to complain about pay. But a "lack of career progress," was by far the biggest gripe from Gen Xers, with 40 percent giving that as a reason for their restlessness, compared with 30 percent of Gen Yers, 20 percent of baby boomers and 14 percent of senior workers.

Gen Yers, meanwhile, were more likely than the other generations to cite "lack of challenges in the job" as a reason they would leave, while baby boomers more often chose "poor employee treatment during the downturn" and a "lack of trust in leadership."

The Deloitte study warns of a "resume' tsunami" once economic recovery begins, especially among Gen Xers, and notes that many executives were largely unaware of employee complaints unrelated to money.

Such findings don't surprise Rich Yudhishthu, a 37-year-old Gen Xer who's a business development consultant from Minneapolis.

"The lack of promotional opportunities has pretty much killed job loyalty within a generation," he says.

Liza Potts, a 35-year-old professor at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va., agrees, but also notes that the disillusionment took hold for many of her peers as far back as childhood.

"Many of my friends had hoped to have jobs like their parents — places they would stay forever that would take care of them like they did their parents. But then we saw that start to crumble for our folks," she says, recalling friends whose fathers and mothers got laid off from companies such as IBM or had to relocate.

Now worried about their own foreclosures, debt and unemployment, her generation is left to do the soul-searching their parents did.

"Is there still time to become something different? Must we just accept where we are? Is there time to innovate elsewhere?" asks Potts who left her own career in the software and Internet industry for a life in academia. It's meant less money, she says, but also more freedom to choose her work hours and projects.

In Chicago, 40-year-old real estate agent Adon Navarette has taken on extra jobs to make it, from consultant for an energy supply company to starting his own health and wellness business. He's heard his peers sniping about other generations, but also thinks their experience with other rough economic patches makes them resilient, too.

It's a pivotal moment, he says.

"What's going to define me as a Gen Xer is how I come out of this. What's going to define me is, 'What have I done to allow myself to take advantage of the market when the market turns around?'" he says.

Sometimes, it means working for less money.

Jon Anne Willow, co-publisher of ThirdCoastDigest.com, an online arts and culture site in Milwaukee, is among employers who've recently been able to hire more experienced candidates for jobs traditionally filled by 20somethings.

They're hungry to work, she says. And as she sees it, that gives her fellow Gen Xers and the baby boomers she's hired a distinct advantage over a lot of the Gen Yers she's come across.

"When the dust settles, they'll be exactly as they were before and we'll just have to sift through them and take the ones that actually get it and hope the rest find employment in fast food," she quips.

Spoken like a truly jaded Gen Xer.

___

Martha Irvine is an AP national writer. She can be reached at mirvine(at)ap.org or via http://twitter.com/irvineap

 

[Watchman]

What are Singaporeans going to do about it?​