GM is currently making cars America wants and it is selling them at full price, none of this Toyota discount nonsense. The cars are outwardly good looking but most of all they are beautifully designed from the floor up and most importantly, they are well engineered. A Cadillac CTS-V (my next car when this recession ends) is thirty grand cheaper than its Mercedes or BMW equivalent and is twice the car. The Chevy Volt (I am praying the battery is American made!) is the most awaited model GM can claim it has had in decades. Car dealers already tell of long waiting lists and they expect the car to resell for far above MSRP until GM’s production can catch up with the public’s demand. Compare the beauty of the Volt to the stark ugliness of Toyota’s Prius. It is night and day. As much as I hate to concede the Japanese have been the trendsetter for small cars over the last twenty years, but they have awoken the sleeping giants. Within two years Ford and GM will leave their Japanese competitors in the dust and they will regain their positions of number one and number two respectively in the world.

Chris Liddell says GM’s public offering could be just months away. I have already got my order in with my stockbroker. My 401K portfolio will be dominated by GM. My only disappointment is they shed the Pontiac brand. Maybe it will be resurrected as GM has to extend its range of models to keep production matching demand! Sure, this might be wishful thinking. After driving Pontiacs for years I will have to get used to telling people, I drive a Caddy, the best car money can buy. If I hold onto my Pontiacs I could have valuable collectors’ items in ten years time!

Good news is Boeing is ramping up 737-800 production another 10% and 777 orders are holding firm. Airbus have been experiencing cancellation in orders and options. For years the European Union and especially France has been propping up Airbus. With the financial crisis enveloping Europe, Airbus might have to start selling their aircraft based upon the real costs of production. This bodes well for Boeing as over the past month the Euiro has devalued nearly 25% against the greenback. The only way Airbus was able to outsell Boeing over the last ten years has been government subsidies have allowed them to have better pricing.

Boeing is a story of outsourcing gone crazy. Much of the blame for production delays is suppliers have either not been able to deliver on time or their parts did not meet up to specification or quality. So much of the stuff should have been manufactured by Boeing-owned factories where quality and production could be controlled from within. This would have avoided Boeing having to fork out $billions in penalties to airlines for delays in delivery. Ever since Boeing moved “mahogany row” from the Everett manufacturing complex to Chicago, their once smooth manufacturing process has gone to hell in a hand-basket.

Ever since the consolidation of the pharmaceutical industry into about five players, China has become the major source of supply for all the component raw materials. From drywall, to petfood ingredients, to baby milk, to toxic toys, to contaminated fish products, to faulty tires, to toothpaste laced with anti-freeze; the list of defective products could fill a book. I am sticking my neck out here, but I believe the recent recall of children’s Motrin, Benadryl and Tylenol will be because those bloody Chinese have shipped defective ingredients to J & J. Earlier this year J & J recalled another bunch of over the counter products because the raw materials were packed onto wooden pallets thus cominating the contents!

Since the pharmaceutical companies’ love affair began with China, their lobbyists have been hard at work undermining the workings of the FDA to all congressmen and senators who accept their campaign donations. Because that is a large majority of our representatives and since Bush came to power on the Republican platform of less government, the FDA has literally gone from a fierce policeman protecting all Americans from bad medicine to the typically ineffective government agency. The issue we have here is profits count more than the health of Americas. Fancy getting to the levels of buying pharmaceutical raw materials from a country that for starters places no value on human life. Add to that their history will doctoring up any sort of crap, call it by an impressive name (in this case its chemical definition) and then have the audacity to sell it to anyone who is willing to buy the rubbish sight unseen.

Shame on you J & J and shame on the Obama and previous administrations for allowing the FDA to lose all its muscle! To me these sorts of things are happening with accelerating propensity all around us in all aspects of our lives. Although this comment may appear somewhat cynical, I believe the era we are now in is similar to the reign of King Caligula when the Roman Empire finally totally collapsed. Sure the times were different, but the greed, corruption and debauchery are exactly the same. Maybe it is another case of history repeating itself.