Some points to ponder...

[Mr. T]

Z/RS
SS

http://myitforum.techtarget.com/blog...1/03/1210.aspx

[427TJ]

Interest in '60s musclecars will never drop. Once they've been defined as valuable and a good investment people never forget that. Yeah, prices go up and down but they mainly go up over time.

Model A Ford roadster/Vicky/coupe prices, or any of the desireable '28-40 Fords, are still strong and they're even re-popping certain body styles. It'll cost you at least $50K to build a nice '32 Ford roadster today and it would be a lot more if people like Brookville weren't making new bodies. 1967-68 Shelbys will always command strong prices--unless the U.S. economy collapses, but that's not likely.

I wonder if GM will continue its terrible downward slide and be bought by China? The Chinese are after Unocal now and they've bought a major piece of IBM recently. GM execs are under intense pressure from Wall Street banks to rid the company of its huge pension and health care obligations (except for upper management, that is). The future seems to be the end of employee pensions and employer-provided health care and to do it some corporations will have to go into bankruptcy to get out from under the laws covering such obligations. Don't rule-out China buying GM and moving it to China, lock, stock, and barrel. The U.S. business/banking community has already warned the U.S. government to butt-out of the Chinese bid for Unocal and if the government allows China to buy Unocal, there's nothing to stop them from buying other American flagship companies like GM. Once it's bankrupt, a corporation's management will be happy to take anyone's money to buy the company.

We fought the Cold War for nearly 50 years. The Cold War's main mission was to halt the spread of Communism. Anyone remember the saying, "Better dead than Red." China is a Communist country but they're our friends now. But I thought Communism was evil? That's what we were taught for 50 years. Now Communism isn't evil anymore? So what happened? We "won" the Cold War, right? What did we win? Did we defeat Communism or just get a few of their missiles dismantled? Or did we gain a new business partner, one that can use its Communist army to quickly crush any labor uprisings a-la the Tiananamen Square massacre in 1989?

What I fear is that the U.S. corporate structure looks to China and its huge population as a direct replacement for "overpaid" American middle-class workers. If any labor unrest should rear its ugly head the Communist army will simply crush it outright. How convenient. No wonder many of our corporations are excited about moving to China. Plus, there are no environmental regulations whatsoever.

Wal-Mart's in-store stock is more than 80% Chinese-Communist produced and supplied. I guess my years in SAC (USAF Strtegic Air Command) sitting on alert waiting for the klaxon to go off were all for nothing now that the Communist Chinese government is our main business partner. No, I do not shop at Wal-Mart. "Buy American" is getting harder and harder to do.

But, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.

[MosportGreen66]

The blue Camaro concept on the website posted has Viper Wheels on it ... and that *hugger* orange Camaro concept has a rear 1/4 panel that has a striking resemblance to a Ferrari 355. Clearly these are computer renderings, nothing remotely close to the car GM has yet to draw. Its still a long shot.

[SamLBInj]

Sam Walton was a hypocrate, Buy American to him meant buy at Wal-mart, Period...Heres a little info on Sam, By the way, if he were alive today he would be the worlds richest man at over 100 Billion Dollars, More than double Gates fortune..Read on...
"Sam was an advocate of importing. It was his vision," said a retired senior executive, who was a buyer in Wal-Mart's Hong Kong office in the 1980s, and who asked to keep his identity private. "Our first office was in Hong Kong, then Taiwan. Korea soon after. We'd visit factories, see how they store goods. You would look at every step of the process very carefully."

"From the beginning, Walton had bought goods wherever he could get them cheapest, with any other considerations secondary," writes Bob Ortega, author of the Wal-Mart history, In Sam We Trust. By the early 1980s, Ortega reports, Walton "increasingly looked to imports, which were usually cheaper because factory workers were paid so much less in China and the other Asian countries."

According to Ortega, Walton himself estimated that imports accounted for nearly 6 percent of Wal-Mart's total sales in 1984. But another observer of that period, Frank Yuan, a former Taiwan-based apparel middleman, who dealt with Wal-Mart in the 1980s, puts the number, including indirect imports, at around 40 percent from "day one." Either way, Walton's vision was a harbinger of far vaster global sourcing today."