Cruel September for Car Makers
GM's Sales Fall 45%, Chrysler's 42% as 'Clunker' Rebate Boost Ends

* Comments (181)

BY MATTHEW DOLAN AND JEFF BENNETT

U.S. auto sales fell 23% in September after the end of the federal government's "cash for clunkers" incentive program, with General Motors Co. and Chrysler Group LLC suffering the sharpest declines.

Car makers sold 745,997 vehicles in September, compared with 964,783 in the same month last year, according to Autodata Corp.

September's seasonally adjusted annualized selling rate came in at 9.2 million vehicles, Autodata said. That is a big drop from July and August, when clunkers rebates caused the sales pace to spike. The July annualized rate was 11.4 million and August's was 14.2 million.

"Call it the 'cash-for-clunkers' hangover," ...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125440186148556087.html?mod=djemalertNEWS

Now, why is the economy at large going to be any different when all the artificial money provided by the stimulus dries up?

Now, why is the economy at large going to be any different when all the artificial money provided by the stimulus dries up?

It's not, but many say the stimulus money never even hit the economy yet, it's just on tap for the banks. All the feds and the shill commentators want to spend our way out of recession when what people should be doing, and are doing, is cutting spending and increasing savings.

"Now, why is the economy at large going to be any different when all the artificial money provided by the stimulus dries up?"

All that's needed is a permanent stimulus- give everyone a printing press.

All that's needed is a permanent stimulus- give everyone a printing press.

Brilliant. Almost the ultimate libertarian solution except you should have to earn the printing press, not be given it.

All that's needed is a permanent stimulus- give everyone a printing press.


Brilliant. Almost the ultimate libertarian solution except you should have to earn the printing press, not be given it.

As crazy as it sounds, there ARE people, ostensibly educated people, who think this way. Almost ALL niggers think this way.

"Why should anybody be without anything that they need or want when all we have to do is print the money and give it to them so they can buy everything they want and need?"

"The only reason you white people don't want Obama to print all this money and give it to people is because you know he will give a lot of it to us black people. Then we won't be poor and you won't be able to take advantage of us anymore. We'll be able to buy houses in your neighborhood and have all the things for our children that you have for yours. That's why you white people don't want the government to print money."

These are things I have actually heard out of people's mouths on the local radio talk show while driving to work.

As crazy as it sounds, there ARE people, ostensibly educated people, who think this way. Almost ALL niggers think this way.

"Why should anybody be without anything that they need or want when all we have to do is print the money and give it to them so they can buy everything they want and need?"

"The only reason you white people don't want Obama to print all this money and give it to people is because you know he will give a lot of it to us black people. Then we won't be poor and you won't be able to take advantage of us anymore. We'll be able to buy houses in your neighborhood and have all the things for our children that you have for yours. That's why you white people don't want the government to print money."

These are things I have actually heard out of people's mouths on the local radio talk show while driving to work.

Last year I was posting on a UK political forum and some liberal doofus was gibbering about wealth redistribution and I asked him if he believed that societies and civilizations just existed or did they have to be built and maintained expecting that he wouldn't deny the obvious.

But he replied yes, they essentially did just exist. I wasn't sure if he was being sarcastic or not but subsequent posts revealed that really was his belief so I couldn't take the discussion any further. Some others piled on and called me a troll as well for simply questioning this.

As crazy as it sounds, there ARE people, ostensibly educated people, who think this way. Almost ALL niggers think this way.

"Why should anybody be without anything that they need or want when all we have to do is print the money and give it to them so they can buy everything they want and need?"

"The only reason you white people don't want Obama to print all this money and give it to people is because you know he will give a lot of it to us black people. Then we won't be poor and you won't be able to take advantage of us anymore. We'll be able to buy houses in your neighborhood and have all the things for our children that you have for yours. That's why you white people don't want the government to print money."

These are things I have actually heard out of people's mouths on the local radio talk show while driving to work.

Yep. This has been studied repeatedly. Niggers, even apart from the lies jews tell them about whites, lack the IQ to grasp how money works. They believe racism is the only reason they aren't as rich and successful as whites. They truly believe that, the vast majority of them. The jews have tied whites to the stake of 'civil rights,' and have piled up kindling around our feet. The minute blacks have power, white men will burn. There truly is no solution save to exterminate jews and ship niggers back to the jungle, where as you have pointed out, they belong.

Brilliant. Almost the ultimate libertarian solution except you should have to earn the printing press, not be given it.

Typical fool, you use words like they have no meaning. The libertarians argue almost alone for hard money. It is the deficit spenders who believe in printing it.

Typical fool, you use words like they have no meaning.

Do I ABSOLUTELY HAVE to add a load of those stupid smilies at the end to make the sarcasm obvious?

The libertarians argue almost alone for hard money.

How do you get "hard money" without regulation?

"How do you get "hard money" without regulation?"

Go to a coin dealer and buy some gold coins.

>>It's not only negroes who misunderstand wealth and money. Keynesian economics is based on the notion that economies run on consumption, rather than on production.
If one guy digs a hole, and another fills it, that is counted as part of the GDP. Bernanke's hellicopter idea- dropping money from the sky- is the same as my printing press idea- except I am joking.

Go to a coin dealer and buy some gold coins.


So the libertarian currency will be physical gold, no paper money?

Most intellectuals teach that wealth is "just there."

Economics professors claim that the market is "the most efficient method of allocating society's scarce resources." This view predominates on the Mises site.

Catholic Social Teaching asserts that "All wealth is placed on Earth by G-d for use of all."

Many are implicit "cargo cultists":

YouTube - Cargo Cult

". . .So the libertarian currency will be physical gold, no paper money?. . ."

Money is whatever the buyer and seller agree it to be. Money is the most liquid form of capital.

Paper has been used as a receipt for physical gold. Receipts can be printed or faked, which is fractional reserve.

A twenty dollar Gold Certificate read: "There have been deposited in the Treasury of the United States Twenty Dollars in Gold Coin payable to the bearer on demand."

Arrangements can be made without the government.

Paper has been used as a receipt for physical gold. Receipts can be printed or faked, which is fractional reserve.

I would say that the fractional reserve note is a corrupt form of currency, but it's not a fake or forgery. That is something different.

A twenty dollar Gold Certificate read: "There have been deposited in the Treasury of the United States Twenty Dollars in Gold Coin payable to the bearer on demand."

Arrangements can be made without the government.

Private money supply then? Will various private money companies be able to compete with each other?

=========

The "cargo cult" video was interesting. I can just see all those liberals swooning with horror that the abo's didn't get the cargo planes they "deserved".

"Private money supply then? Will various private money companies be able to compete with each other?"

Yes. It's called free banking:

Book Review
by Richard M. Ebeling, November 2001


Money and the Market: Essays on Free Banking, by Kevin Dowd (New York/London: Routledge, 2001); 226 pages; $100.


KEVIN DOWD IS ONE OF THE LEADING free-market monetary theorists today. Along with Lawrence H. White and George Selgin, he has helped to revive and refine the case for abolishing central banking and replacing it with a market-based competitive free-banking system.


In 1976, Austrian economist Friedrich A. Hayek published a monograph, The Denationalization of Money, in which he called for an end to the government monopoly and control over money and for replacing it with private banks’ issuing their own currencies.

Eight years later, in 1984, Lawrence White published a book on free banking in Britain during the first half of the 19th century. This was followed in 1988 by George Selgin’s Theory of Free Banking: Money Supply under Competitive Note Issue. Since then both men have published widely in the mainstream economics journals, and they have written a number of other books that make the case for private, competitive banking.

Also in 1988, Kevin Dowd came out with a short monograph, Private Money: The Path to Monetary Stability, which was followed the next year by a longer book entitled The State and the Monetary System. In 1993, he collected 16 of his articles and published them as a book under the title Laissez-faire Banking. And in 1996, he published Competition and Finance: A Reinterpretation of Financial and Monetary Economics. He also edited an insightful collection of essays, The Experience of Free Banking (1992), in which seven authors recounted past episodes of free banking in countries around the world.

Now Dowd has brought together another collection of his articles and published them under the title Money and the Market: Essays on Free Banking. In the first half of the book, the theme is how a laissez-faire banking and financial system could successfully function and actually function better than the present system of central banking and government insurance of deposits.

In a lengthy essay entitled “The Invisible Hand and the Evolution of the Monetary System,” he explains how a monetary and banking system might have emerged and fully developed if government had not usurped control over money and its creation. He follows the argument of Carl Menger, the founder of the Austrian school (Non-jewish!! RR), in explaining how money originated out of the inconveniences of barter, as people searched for indirect methods to attain their ends in trade. Historically, people have found that there are certain commodities in greater demand and that are more easily transported and divided to reflect agreed-upon terms of trade. Over time these tend to become the most widely used and generally accepted media of exchange. In other words, the market selects them as the money-goods.


Fractional-reserve banking
Over time people found it useful for safekeeping to store their gold and silver monies with goldsmiths, who would issue receipts as claims to the goods left on deposit. These receipts at some point began to be accepted in trade as money substitutes, as items “good as gold” that could be redeemed on demand. The goldsmiths developed into “bankers,” accepting deposits and issuing loans to borrowers. But they also discovered that they could issue notes — or money substitutes — for more gold or silver than was actually on deposit, because deposits and withdrawals were found to follow certain patterns that required very little actual gold money to be on hand for redemption purposes. And out of this discovery emerged fractional-reserve banking.


Dowd does not consider this practice illegitimate or harmful as long as banks are required to redeem all depositor claims on demand. For then, each private bank would have to avoid any excessive issuance of notes in the form of loans; otherwise they would run the risk of weakening depositor confidence in the bank’s ability to pay on demand when too many notes were presented for payment. The instability from a fractional-reserve system, he argues, has come from the government monopolization of the monetary system, which has resulted in the elimination of the historical “gold anchor” of note redemption, and from the ability of the government’s central bank to issue as many units of paper money as it desires with no direct or immediate “negative feedback” to stop the money-creation process.

He then develops his own theoretical conception of how a private competitive banking system could have moved away from a gold basis over time. Instead, he thinks that private banking would have shifted into offering to redeem notes in the form of baskets of commodities or financial assets. Other advocates of free banking have argued that such an evolution away from a commodity like gold would be unlikely to occur. But in practice there is no way of knowing exactly what consumers and depositors would desire as a commodity basis of a free monetary system until central banking is abolished and market transactors are allowed to make their own evaluations and choices.


Monetary central planning
Dowd is confident that international market forces are moving in directions likely to weaken the power of national governments to manipulate the money supply through central banking in the 21st century. This partly makes up the theme of the second half of the book. Technological advancements in the use and transfer of financial instruments and forms of media of exchange are slowly but surely reducing government control of money and money creation. The door will be opened to the development of a more market-based and market-created global monetary regime.


In this context, Dowd includes an essay, “What Role for Government?” that he wrote in 1993 in which he discusses the problems of monetary reform in the former Soviet-bloc countries, including Russia. Inflation, he explains, is easy to stop; the political authority simply must stop printing money. There would be an unavoidable stabilization crisis, given the distortions and imbalances the monetary inflation would have generated. But it need not be either prolonged or severe if the monetary authority generates the public confidence that inflation is over and will not recur. Then the market, if left free of interventions and controls, can bring supplies and demands into balance in a reasonable period of time.

In the 1920s, after the inflations during and just following the First World War, countries such as Germany, Austria, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia were able to recreate a degree of monetary order and stability by restoring, however incompletely, a gold standard as an anchor for their respective national currencies. With gold no longer in use by governments as the basis for their monetary systems, Dowd recommends the short-run benefits of currency boards. A currency board operates much like a gold standard: a government links its own national currency to a larger and stronger currency, such as the U.S. dollar or the German mark. The national currency may not be increased unless there is a net inflow of, say, dollars into that country’s banking system; and if there is a net outflow of dollars from the banking system, that nation’s central bank must decrease its national currency according to the fixed ratio established between its money and the dollar.

But Dowd argues that while establishing a currency board is a useful and effective way of eliminating a government’s independent power to increase its money supply, at most it should be viewed as a transitional step leading to a free, competitive banking system completely outside the control and regulation of the government. Indeed, he argues that even during the currency-board period private banks should be free to offer alternative monetary instruments in competition with the national currency issued by the government. Such instruments would reinforce and ease the process, leading to a fully nongovernmental monetary order.

In the introduction Kevin Dowd explains the simple outlook from which he approaches monetary issues: “I believe that markets generally work and governments generally fail; the invisible hand of the market is better than the visible hand of the state.” His analysis demonstrates that this is no less true in the arena of money and banking. Let us hope that he is right in his optimistic view of what the 21st century may hold in store for the possibility of a free banking system.

http://www.fff.org/freedom/1101j.asp

Anyone has the common law right to lend.

Yes. It's called free banking:

http://www.fff.org/freedom/1101j.asp



What's to stop a "free banking" system from becoming corrupt like the one we have now?

"What's to stop a "free banking" system from becoming corrupt like the one we have now?"

There would be no system. Today's corruption is from government supported cartelization. Banks could go corrupt- the answer is to go next door, after dealing with the corrupt banker.

http://wpcontent.answers.com/wikipedia/commons/9/9a/1774_lynching.jpg

There would be no system.

I would have thought that with no system, or no standardized currency within your nation, you would never have a first world economy. Huge amounts of time will be wasted on verifying whether someone and whatever currency they deal in is legit.

Today's corruption is from government supported cartelization

And tomorrows corruption could be from private corporate supported cartels (some may argue that's already the case). The libertarian model seems to deal with this situation by offering the glib assertion that you can "take your business elsewhere".

Banks could go corrupt- the answer is to go next door,

How do you go next door when to another bank when:

a) The bank next door is part of the same corrupt cartel (which opperates in secret)?

b) You've lost all your money?

after dealing with the corrupt banker.

How will you deal with this corrupt banker when:

a) He made off with his ill gotten gains just before his business collapsed?

b) The cartel closes ranks to protect one of their own?

c) He's protected by his own private security team?

http://cbs3.com/topstories/cash.clunkers.dealers.2.1268247.html

Car Dealers Clogged With Acres Of Clunkers

WASHINGTON (AP) ― Trade-ins from the Cash for Clunkers program are piling up and auto recyclers are seeking more time to meet the deadline for disposing of all those vehicles.

At some places, Ford Explorers, Chevy Blazers, Chrysler Town & Country minivans and other popular clunkers are parked bumper to bumper on several acres, many marked "C4C" on their windows, waiting to be drained of fluids, stripped of valuable parts and eventually flattened for scrap.

"I've got a parking lot of almost 4,000 vehicles right now," said Harry Haluptzok, chief executive of John's Auto Parts in Blaine, Minn., near Minneapolis. His business typically dismantles 100 vehicles per week, but the workload has now more than doubled, and Haluptzok hired 10 more workers to keep up with all the extra vehicles.

Under the program, the cars are required to be crushed or shredded within six months of the date the vehicle is transferred from the dealership. Recyclers say the deadline, even a few months away, will be hard as they try to remove spare parts such as transmissions, front and rear axles, starters and alternators.

"True recycling is using something to its fullest potential and then recycling it over again by making it into steel and sending it out to become another engine or transmission or car," said Jeff Cantor, an auto recycler in Candia, N.H. "We're breaking that circle here by crushing good quality parts. We can't process them quick enough in six months."

Consumers bought nearly 700,000 new vehicles in late July and August through the program, taking advantage of rebates of up to $4,500 on new cars in return for trading in their older vehicles. Congress tripled the size of its original $1 billion price tag because of the program's popularity.

Used engines from the vehicles were required to be destroyed to promote improved fuel efficiency.

The American Recyclers Association, a trade group representing auto recyclers, said the six-month deadline to crush the vehicles was developed in line with the initial $1 billion program, but never took into account the additional vehicles sold when the program was expanded. The association met with the Transportation Department in late September seeking an additional six months to recycle the cars.

"We do have a lot of facilities that have two or three times the number of vehicles they could ever have imagined getting. They're trying to process these in addition to their regular business," said Michael Wilson, the trade group's executive director.

Transportation Department spokeswoman Sasha Johnson said the department was aware of the request and noted that under the regulations, "most trade-ins through the CARS program do not need to be crushed until at least early next year."

In metropolitan Los Angeles, Aadlen Bros. Auto Wrecking in Sun Valley brought in about 6,000 vehicles through the Clunkers program since early September. "At times, we were having to stack cars on top of cars — it got unruly there for a little bit," auto recycle Nathan Adlen said.

Most of the vehicles on their 26-acre lot go into a self-service yard, letting customers find the used parts they need for their vehicles. A car typically stays there for a month, but many vehicles have gone to the crusher earlier than normal because of the influx.

In Minnesota, Haluptzok expected to receive more than 1,000 cars through the program but saw his load grow to nearly 5,000. Each vehicle needs to be drained of oil, antifreeze and other fluids and then properly recycled.

"If it's about recycling, the thing to do is to give us another six months and let us do them the correct way each time," he said.

After these car companies fired all their American workers, and moved the plants to Mexico, these laid-off American workers can't afford to buy their cars now. Henry Ford paid his workers the equivalent of $100 dollars an hour, so all his workers could buy a Ford Car.
the Mexican workers building the GM, Ford, Chrysler cars can't afford to buy their cars either, all the money is ending up in the pockets of billionaires.

>>It's not only negroes who misunderstand wealth and money. Keynesian economics is based on the notion that economies run on consumption, rather than on production.
If one guy digs a hole, and another fills it, that is counted as part of the GDP. Bernanke's hellicopter idea- dropping money from the sky- is the same as my printing press idea- except I am joking.

Don't forget that they count someone making a hamburger at McNigger's as a manufacturing job.

Looks like GMAC needs more money....

OCTOBER 28, 2009
WALL ST JOURNAL

Lender in Advanced Talks for Third Slug of Taxpayer Cash -- at Least $2.8 Billion More

By DAN FITZPATRICK and DAMIAN PALETTA

In a stark reminder of how some battered financial firms remain dependent on government lifelines, GMAC Financial Services Inc. and the Treasury Department are in advanced talks to prop up the lender with its third helping of taxpayer money, people familiar with the matter said.

The U.S. government is likely to inject $2.8 billion to $5.6 billion of capital into the Detroit company, on top of the $12.5 billion that GMAC has received since December 2008, these people said. The latest infusion would come in the form of preferred stock. The government's 35.4% stake in the company could increase if existing shares eventually are converted into common equity.

The willingness by Treasury officials to deepen taxpayer exposure to GMAC reflects the troubled company's importance to the revival of the auto industry. Founded in 1919, GMAC has $181 billion in assets and is a major financier for 15 million borrowers and thousands of General Motors and Chrysler car dealerships.

The new capital would help firm up GMAC's balance sheet and solidify its auto-loan business. GMAC provides the vast majority of wholesale financing for GM dealerships across the country, meaning thousands would be unable to bring new vehicles onto their lots if GMAC were to collapse.

Federal officials also are moving to shore up GMAC's ability to fund its daily operations, with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. telling the company Tuesday the agency will guarantee an additional $2.9 billion in debt, according to people familiar with the discussions. The FDIC guarantee will make it easier for the company to sell debt to investors. The FDIC backed $4.5 billion in GMAC-issued debt earlier this year.

The FDIC approval came just four days before the expiration of the regulator's program that guarantees debt issued by certain banks. It ended months of tense negotiations between GMAC and regulators. Without a deal, the company would have been forced to further reduce its lending volume. New-car loans by the company tumbled 55% to $5.6 billion in the second quarter from a year earlier.

As part of the agreement, GMAC agreed to keep interest rates on deposit accounts offered through its banking unit at certain levels, according to people familiar with the situation.

While GMAC would be the only U.S. company to get three capital injections from the government since the financial crisis erupted two years ago, thousands of banks and other financial firms remain weakened by exposure to fallen real-estate values and clobbered financial markets.

Among U.S. banks that got a total of $204.64 billion in aid through the Troubled Asset Relief Program, just one-third of the capital has been repaid so far. Government officials are skeptical that some banks now wanting to escape the government's grip are strong enough to do so, with Bank of America Corp.'s attempt to repay bailout funds snagged by a disagreement over how much additional capital the bank must raise to satisfy regulators, people familiar with the situation said.

At GMAC, the likelihood of a third infusion increased when the government's stress-test results were released in May. The tests were conducted to determine whether banks would need more capital to continue lending if the economy deteriorated in 2009 and 2010. The test concluded GMAC needed $11.5 billion in common equity to continue lending in a stressed economy.

GMAC raised some of the money directly from the government, but a significant hole remains. The company hasn't been able to attract much capital from private investors because it isn't listed as a public company, forcing GMAC to begin negotiating with the government to find the remaining funds. GMAC and Treasury officials are now negotiating about exactly how much capital the company needs.

"GMAC is the only one of the banks that went through the stress test to need additional government capital," Treasury spokesman Andrew Williams said. "All other institutions were able to raise any necessary capital from investors and several paid back the taxpayer."

People close to GMAC said the company's outlook is better than it was in May, and that unlike other banks that went through the stress-test process, GMAC won't be forced to fill the entire capital hole even with a third infusion. Bank of America has raised about $40 billion in new equity, higher than the $34 billion required, and regulators are asking it to raise even more if it wants to return $45 billion in U.S. aid.

The U.S. government's current 35.4% stake in GMAC is the result of a 2009 restructuring of GM.

People close to GMAC said they don't expect the government to call for changes in management as a result of the likely infusion. The company posted a second-quarter loss of $3.9 billion amid rising loan delinquencies and the continued U.S. auto slump. It expects to release third-quarter earnings next week.

For decades, GMAC served as GM's finance arm. In 2006, GM sold a majority stake to private-equity firm Cerberus Capital Management, which eventually installed former Bank of America Chief Financial Officer Alvaro de Molina as CEO. The collapse of the U.S. housing market and declining U.S. auto sales nearly crushed GMAC, forcing Mr. de Molina to curtail lending and seek help to finance its operations.

Mr. de Molina's search for capital brought him to the government's door. The Fed awarded GMAC status as a bank-holding company and Treasury injected $5 billion in December 2008. It came back with an additional $7.5 billion on May 21. The Fed also waived rules to allow the bank to pass assets down into its bank division, and the FDIC reluctantly agreed to issue "up to" $7.4 billion in government-backed debt. The FDIC approval issued Tuesday brings GMAC to the full amount authorized in May.

In another defining moment, GMAC entered into an agreement with Chrysler in April 2009 to provide auto financing and services to Chrysler dealers and customers. This allowed GMAC to leverage its core strength of auto financing and become part of a solution with the U.S. government to restructure the auto industry.

In May, GMAC also launched a new brand for its online bank, called Ally Bank. Its pursuit of deposits at high rates became a key leg of its strategy, since deposits provide a cheap form of funding, but the taxpayer-assisted approach rankled competitors and the FDIC.

The dispute nearly cost GMAC its chance at the final $2.9 billion in FDIC debt guarantees. The two sides were able to hammer out an agreement that asks GMAC to keep its rates at certain amounts in exchange for the support.http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125668489932511683.html?mod=WSJ_hps_LEFTWhatsNews

After these car companies fired all their American workers, and moved the plants to Mexico, these laid-off American workers can't afford to buy their cars now. Henry Ford paid his workers the equivalent of $100 dollars an hour, so all his workers could buy a Ford Car.
the Mexican workers building the GM, Ford, Chrysler cars can't afford to buy their cars either, all the money is ending up in the pockets of billionaires.

Precisely, generally speaking.

I introduce you to the worst aspect of the human male in general, and the jew in particular: greed.

http://www.faculty.fairfield.edu/faculty/hodgson/Courses/so11/stratification/income&wealth.htm

I guess you could call me a socialist. Or even a National Socialist.

Sieg Heil?

It wasn't the banks that needed bailing out with ZOG funny money. The banksters and financiers stole the peoples' money, squirreled it away overseas (Israel, Switzerland, the Caymans, etc), and then claimed losses using uber shady accounting practices.

Money is never "lost", it simply changes hands. I take that back. Because I know I've lost a few pennies and nickels over the years.

Just as true 200 years ago as it is now:

"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.

---Thomas Jefferson

Homeless yet?

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact:
Jeannine Fallon/Chintan Talati
Edmunds.com Corporate Communications
www.Edmunds.com
Media Hotline: 310-309-4900
pr@edmunds.com

Cash for Clunkers Results Finally In: Taxpayers Paid $24,000 per Vehicle Sold, Reports Edmunds.com

SANTA MONICA, Calif. — October 28, 2009 — Edmunds.com, the premier resource for online automotive information, has determined that Cash for Clunkers cost taxpayers $24,000 per vehicle sold.

Nearly 690,000 vehicles were sold during the Cash for Clunkers program, officially known as CARS, but Edmunds.com analysts calculated that only 125,000 of the sales were incremental. The rest of the sales would have happened anyway, regardless of the existence of the program.

Ironically, the average transaction price for a new vehicle in August 2009 was only $26,915 minus an average cash rebate of $1,667.

"This analysis is valuable for two reasons," explained Edmunds.com CEO Jeremy Anwyl. "First, it can form the basis for a complete assessment of the program's impact and costs. Second—and more important—it can help us to understand the true state of auto sales and the economy. For example, October sales are up, but without Cash for Clunkers, sales would have been even better. This suggests that the industry's recovery is gaining momentum."

The chart below sets forth actual SAAR (Seasonally Adjusted Annual Rate) compared to Edmunds.com's forecasted rate if the program had never been implemented.

[see link below for chart]

"Our research indicates that without the Cash for Clunkers program, many customers would not have traded in an old vehicle when making a new purchase," Edmunds.com Senior Analyst David Tompkins, PhD told AutoObserver.com. "That may give some credence to the environmental claims, but unfortunately the economic claims have been rendered quite weak."

To conduct the analysis, the Edmunds.com team of PhDs and statisticians examined the sales trend for luxury vehicles and others not included in Cash for Clunkers, and applied the historic relationship of those vehicles to total SAAR to make informed estimates. These estimates were independently verified through careful examination of sales patterns reflected by transaction data. Once the numbers were determined, Edmunds.com's analysts divided three billion dollars by 125,000 vehicles to arrive at the average $24,000 per vehicle.

Coincidentally, a parallel analysis of the first-time homebuyer credit was reported yesterday by MIT Sloan Professor Simon Johnson and Yale law student James Kwak, who both blog about economics at The BaseLine Scenario.

http://www.edmunds.com/help/about/press/159446/article.html

So the libertarian currency will be physical gold, no paper money?

It's the only kind of money allowed for in the Constitution.

Paper money backed by gold. Get rid of the federal reserve. The federal government should require a balanced budget, as with the case with many states. This would force the federal government to cut its size in half, much of which is useless anyways.

This would force the federal government to cut its size in half, most of which is worse than useless anyways. Fixed it for you.:)