Business Insight Zone

Bullet points for brevity . . .

Following up on GM’s a stumper:

• CNN — Sources: Obama pressed Bush for auto industry bailout — “At their private Oval Office meeting on Monday, President-elect Barack Obama urged President Bush to support billions of dollars in aid for the struggling auto industry during the upcoming lame-duck session of Congress, according to three officials briefed on the meeting.”
• WSJ MarketBeat blog — GM’s Slimming Waistline — “Since the company’s market capitalization has roughly fallen in half in a week, the once proud Dow component is now below the $2 billion threshold used by many Wall Street trading operations to denote the difference between a small cap and mid cap. However, citing the company’s brand and continued huge volume in trading of the stock, brokerages say trading responsibilities for GM aren’t going anywhere.”
• From James Surowiecki’s new blog, “The Balance Sheet,” at The New Yorker — Do We Have to Save G.M. Because We Let Lehman Fail? — “Had the financial system stayed reasonably stable, rather than plunging into the chaos we’ve seen in the past six weeks, then one might have been able to make the case that General Motors, with its three-billion-dollar market cap, was not all that important, in either literal or psychological terms, and that the market could easily weather its failure. Today, I think that sounds incredibly implausible to anyone who’s paying attention to the credit and equity markets.”

Following up on Sheldon Adelson: “successful” is more important than “nice”:

• WSJ MarketBeat blog — Adelson’s Vanishing Billions — “The convertible [note issue] illustrates how rapidly and terribly Sands, the gambling sector and the broader U.S. economy are bottoming. Just over a month ago, Sands needed under $500 million and now it needs more than $2 billion more to pad its coffers against the downturn.”

(So perhaps now Adelson will have neither “successful” nor “nice”?)

Following up on The “car of the future” isn’t even in the future:

• New Hampshire Union Leader (via Making Light) — Kamen’s Revolt — “The same day that Ford and General Motors announced catastrophic third-quarter losses, Dean Kamen was showing off his new electric car. The prototype vehicle, a zippy two-seat hatchback designed with more than a passing resemblance to the Volkswagen Beetle, can go about 60 miles on a single charge of its lithium battery and with practically zero emissions.”

Following up on Bottled water: indulgent and evil?:

• Christopher S. Penn’s Awaken Your Superhero blog — Crystal clear, sparkling bottle of marketing — “So do the math. $1.60/gallon for home delivery of the same water you can get out of your Boston-area faucet WITH filtration for 14.3 cents. Only marketing can make a 10x markup like that work and still get consumers to buy product by the truckload.”

What are the most interesting business developments you’re seeing this week?

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Related Hoover’s company records:

• General Motors
• Las Vegas Sands
• Ford

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Category: Consumer goods, Economics, Transportation