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Their industries are facing labor shortages because of their aging population, and their racial hostilities forbid them from importing laborers to keep their factories bustling. They are awash with cash no one wants to spend, and nothing is ever going to change quickly there. Their traditions are so ingrained, and they are all so alike, there's no way for them to respond to the rest of the world's changes rapidly. When in economic trouble, they hunker down and become isolated from the rest of the world.
The Japanese know that a massive influx of illegal immigrants or low skilled immigrants just won't work and western Europe and SOME parts of the U.S. prove this.
Race riots are a common thing now in the U.K, France and even Australia.
You are right, Japan has almost zero natural resources, yet, they become the leading player in global market. We have rich natural resources and a beautiful land, do we really need so many low skilled immigrants and illegals to bring us down?
I hope that Japan not follow the example of England, Germany, and France because these countries have faced enormous problems related to immigrants.
lol @ they hunker down and become isolated from the rest of the world. Japan? lol
Nothing was going to happen to GM in any rush. They had been in this position for years.
More ignorant nonsense.
NO they had NOT "been in this position for years". Was the company shedding 800,000 jobs/month "for years"? Was the stock market crashing "for years"? Were banks in panic "for years"?
The economy in 2008/2009 was NOT the way the economy had been "for years". It IS true that GM had been struggling for a number of years, but those struggles were well within GMs' ablity to weather and PALED in comparison to what happened in 2008/2009.
In late 2008 the country was shedding roughly 800,000 jobs/month, the stock market was tanking, home prices were crashing, banks were in panic. How many people were BUYING CARS under those conditions? The fact is, U.S. new car sales fell by 1/3rd between 2007 and 2009 - that's a HUGE decrease, and it affected EVERY SINGLE CAR MANUFACTURER. GM and Chrysler were worse off because they were badly run, but as I mentioned, even the fairly well-run companies were hit hard. Ford only survived because it had secured a line credit. Toyota was worried enough that its' management tried to secure a bailout deal from the Japanese government. That deal fell through and Toyota - one of the best managed car manufacturers on the planet - did manage to survive anyway, but ALL the car companies were trouble in 2008/2009. ALL OF THEM.
Credit.....if the money isn't there the credit is worthless.
The MONEY was THERE. The problem was the banks wouldn't LOAN IT because they were in panic mode. The CREDIT MARKETS were LOCKED UP.
How many times does that have to be repeated??????
The fact is the banks had NO CLUE what their assets were worth so they simply stopped making big loans until they could figure it out. The end result was that money was NOT AVAILABLE to be loaned out. No bank is going to make loans on that scale when they don't even know how much they have to loan.
If YOU were a banker would YOU make a loan of that size when you didn't know if you had enough assets available to cover the loan??????
If McDonalds were to face dire straits. Should u and I bail them out.
Before bankrupty gm janitors make 35$ an hour . After bankruptcy gm janitors make $25 an hour- get the picture. There costs structure was way out of line-it needed to be fixed. Let the market do it- not bush or obama.
Govts job is not to pick winners and losers. It picked solyndra for gods sake................lol.
The program that funded Solyndra just made a $5 Billion profit. Update your talking points.
2009 was not normal times. In normal times they may have had the ability to reorganize, get financing private or public, and/or go with a conventional BK.
In 2009 it was do or die for GM. And to die meant liquidation, taking more time, and the loss of all sorts of related infrastructure business and suppliers. Many of the same ones supplying Ford and other automakers.
Then down and down the tubes.
Had this happened independent of any general nation wide economic crash it would have been handled conventionally. Like today.
Agreed. Word was 2008 to 2009 could've been MUCH worse. It was scary then.
They are outsourcing factories so I am not exactly sure how exactly mass immigration of unskilled laborers is going to improve things.
Factories can be rebuilt. The United States is doing just that, and is bringing once outsourced products back home. Factories need unskilled workers just as much as skilled workers; for every high-skill job in them, there is another job that is grunt work.
The Japanese were once the masters of reconstruction, 50 years ago. They first needed to re-built every heavy industry they had first- steel and metals foundries, glass factories, and all the others were destroyed by bombers in WWII, so it took them 20 years to do it.
But once they did, they had all brand new facilities that were more economical and efficient than America's older works, and they had a labor force of highly disciplined middle aged men and women and their children, all eager for steady work. That's how they became such a titan in the 60s through the 80s.
30 years later, the middle-aged are now all old, and their children are all middle-aged. The grandkids are much fewer in number, and they are in cubicles now, not on the factory floors like dad and grandmother.
We have millions more young than they, and ours get along with each other better than their parents ever got along. Our kids aren't as well educated, so we have millions of them looking for exactly the same thing the Japanese wanted 60 years ago, and our industry is beginning to see the folly of using too much overseas production.
The U.S. always kept our designs, innovations and high-grad tooling here. The Japanese did not. They moved their factories lock, stock, and barrel to Korea, and then to China. We don't have to rebuild our research, testing, and development facilities. They do. With fewer workers in their prime years to do it.
We have people from all parts of the world who want to come here. We have attracted the best and brightest from other countries for a long time now. Japan doesn't want Indians, Africans, Europeans, or Americans coming to Japan. We gain, they lose.
Everything is circular. They learned from us how modern manufacturing works after the war, and beat us at our own game. Now, we have learned from them, have stepped up our own game, and are better prepared for the 21st century than they are. Japan is still a giant, just as we are, but an aging giant in a world full of young people.
We won't ever be as economically dominant as we were in the 50s and 60s, but we are still the biggest industrial nation on earth, and we are now better situated than Japan. Their return will take them longer than before, and we aren't coasting any more.
The Japanese know that a massive influx of illegal immigrants or low skilled immigrants just won't work and western Europe and SOME parts of the U.S. prove this.
Race riots are a common thing now in the U.K, France and even Australia.
You are right, Japan has almost zero natural resources, yet, they become the leading player in global market. We have rich natural resources and a beautiful land, do we really need so many low skilled immigrants and illegals to bring us down?
I hope that Japan not follow the example of England, Germany, and France because these countries have faced enormous problems related to immigrants.
lol @ they hunker down and become isolated from the rest of the world. Japan? lol
Agree.
Every country knows that a massive influx of illegal immigrants (which means lawbreakers) will drag an economy down because it forces wages and hours down, therefore benefits as well.
We are not a country with too few workers, but rather a country with disinterested leadership and an inability to see how the average American lives.
It probably isn't hard in Washington DC to get a deluded sense of the economic state of the counry. I know when I have driven through there it is always bustling with construction going on, because they get first crack at the money.
I hope that the republican leadership addresses this issue as they first order of business when they take office in January because the number one job of the government is to PROTECT THE CITIZENS.
Write to your representatives and remind them all, because they seem to have forgotten that fact.
Japan isn't in any abyss. They were buying big ticket items left and right when it was announced that the sales tax would go up. A country in an abyss can not do this.
You are apparently ill informed. Japan is the poster child for an economy in dire straits.
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