Showing posts with label IIBD. Show all posts
Showing posts with label IIBD. Show all posts

Monday, July 11, 2016

Another Sign That Shale Is Rebounding

FRACKING: Another Sign That Shale Is Rebounding.
If, as the old saying goes, two out of three ain’t bad, then five out of six has to be verging on being downright good. That’s welcome news for the embattled American shale industry, which has seen the number of active rigs currently in operation increase for five of the last six weeks. Frackers have had to endure a price collapse that at one point sent the cost of a barrel of oil below $28 per barrel, but now that prices have seemed to stabilize around $50 per barrel, all signs are pointing towards a rebound. . . .
The rig count was closely tracked these last two years as a bearish crude market slowed and eventually curbed the shale boom, but it shouldn’t be considered a perfect metric. When faced with a cash crunch, drillers will naturally shut down their least productive rigs first while leaving the real gushers in place, so the drop in rigs didn’t tightly track with a drop in overall production.
That said, it’s undoubtedly good news that the rig count is once again rising. It’s a sign that, should prices hold, the worst is over for U.S. shale. Analysts expect the rig count to continue to rise, too, topping 600 next year and averaging just shy of 1,000 in 2018. Step one for rekindling the shale revolution is drilling more wells, and five of the last six weeks we’ve seen evidence of just that.
Frackers are doing more to save western civilization than most of those charged with its defense.

Monday, August 5, 2013

Obama's Zinn History (O's Sloppy History)

Obama's Sloppy History Problem


 
Whatever the opposite of a charm offensive is, President Obama is on it.


In Chicago on July 24, Obama delivered an hour-long speech in which he complained [3] that “with this endless parade of distractions and political posturing and phony scandals, Washington has taken its eye off the ball.” The mother of one of the four Americans murdered at the U.S. diplomatic facility in Benghazi immediately objected [4]. “He’s wrong. My son is dead. How could that be phony?”

A short while later, Obama was at it again.

Describing an Oval Office visit with the Vietnamese president Truong Tan Song, Mr. Obama reported [5]: “We discussed the fact that Ho Chi Minh was actually inspired by the U.S. Declaration of Independence and Constitution, and the words of Thomas Jefferson.”
That assertion registered pretty high on the gaffe meter. Noted [6] the editorial team at Investor’s Business Daily, “Few comparisons have been as odious as the one offered by the president linking one of the great mass murderers of history to one of America's Founding Fathers and authors of our liberty.”

It’s alarming when presidents engage in the practice of sloppy history—especially sloppy war history.

While Ho quoted the Declaration and Jefferson in his 1945 Declaration of Independence from the French, no reputable scholar of the Vietnam War would ever claim that he aimed to adopt American notions of a democratic civil society. Quite the contrary. His goal was to prevent the French from reestablishing their hold to Indochina once the Japanese were expelled. To that end, he did everything possible to ingratiate himself with the in-country American military advisors—and that included salting his declaration with cherished phrases from the American founding.

The advisors fell for it. Their “failure to identify Ho Chi Minh as Soviet-trained and a Communist ideologue,” Claude Berube wrote in a study of OSS operations [7], “was a major American intelligence shortcoming that smoothed the way for Ho’s emergence as a national leader and in the end, an enemy of the United States.”

But President Obama possesses more than a half-century of hindsight that those advisors could not. And getting that history right is as important to good governance as getting good intelligence.

The decisions we make that will affect our future are based very much on what we have experienced and what we think we know about the past. No matter how visionary or forward- looking a person may be, many of their judgments are based on history as they understand it. When our recollections of the past are faulty, it leads to even faultier judgments.

Many U.S. policy makers maintain that the Chinese decision-making is inscrutable and visionary. As proof, they often cite a 1972 exchange between Henry Kissinger and Zhou Enlai at the Paris Peace Talks:
Kissinger: Do you think the French Revolution was a success?
Zhou: It's too early to tell.
Wow, that sounds profound. Except we have known for at least several years that Zhou thought Kissinger was talking about the Paris student riots in 1968—not the “let them eat cake,” guillotine-shadowed debacle that started in 1789. Zhou was a being an evasive politician, not a profound philosopher. Yet the story is still frequently told in Washington cocktail circles—and always with the wrong context.

Politicians are drawn to lazy history because it makes life easy for them. If they are wedded to the caricature of Chinese leaders as inscrutable deep-thinkers, a glib historical vignette can make their case…and provide an easy excuse for failure. After all, if the Chinese are inscrutable, no diplomat can be expected to “read” them properly, and no foreign policy can be expected to work as advertised.

The most serious case of such indolent history is the progressive view of the Vietnam War. Obama was barely out of diapers when Lyndon Johnson started ramping up the ground war. Yet, make no mistake, his understanding of the history of that war shapes his approach to today’s wars. “As President Obama was considering a deeper American commitment to Afghanistan,” wrote Marvin Kalb in The New York Times [8], “he would occasionally slip into an aide’s office, lean on his desk and wonder aloud whether he was making the same mistakes Johnson had made.”

In Obama’s history, Johnson’s failure was that he got roped into a long-term commitment. The fear of commitment led Obama to prematurely pull the plug on Iraq. It led him to opt for the light touch in Libya. It has made him pant for the zero option in Afghanistan. And it has moved him to exhibit zero interest in Syria.

But in following his self-taught history lesson of avoiding tragedy by avoiding commitment, he has adopted a tragically wrongheaded foreign policy.

After all the blood and treasure invested in Iraq, the premature U.S. pullout has given Al Qaeda and Iran a second chance to make mischief. The country just had its most violent month since 2007.
The massacre of Americans at the US consulate in Libya made that Obama effort the poster-child for the failure of on-the-cheap-foreign-policy.

In Afghanistan the White House is racing towards zero, while civilian deaths at the hands of the Taliban racing in the opposite direction.

And Syria is looking like an endless war.
Assuming that Johnson’s problem was fighting a long war is lazy history. Some long wars must be fought. Johnson’s problem was he fought a stupid war.

A less superficial history of the Vietnam conflict suggests that the progressive way of war is anything but the practice “smart” power. Johnson actually started out acting much like Obama, trying to do just enough to avoid being accused of doing nothing. This approach—doing as little as possible to get by—is called the “incrementalist” strategy.

The problem with an incrementalist approach is that the enemy pretty quickly figures out your strategy—and responds by incrementally and repeatedly upping the ante. Johnson got sucked into doing more and more until he was in too deep. Then he lacked the judgment to fight the war in a manner that would lead to a responsible conclusion.

The only difference between Johnson and Obama is that, in trying avoid being another Johnson, Obama is even more cautious and risk averse. In reality, however, he winds up in the same place—failing to defend U.S. interests and leaving the world convinced that America is in retreat.

When it comes to foreign policy, Obama’s sloppy history is feeding his penchant for failing often and early.

James Jay Carafano is vice president of defense and foreign policy studies at The Heritage Foundation.

Tuesday, September 18, 2012

O's Roanoke Doctrine

Obama's Roanoke Doctrine: Profit Must Be Rewarded With Confiscation


By CHARLES R. KESLER
Posted 09/17/2012 07:04 PM ET

In a so far lackluster campaign, Republicans have landed few punches except against President Obama's memorable slur last July that "you didn't build that."

"Those ads taking my words about small business out of context — they're flat-out wrong," Obama complained in a reaction ad.

Actually, he hadn't mentioned "small" business in that part of his speech in Roanoke, Va.; he was speaking of millionaires. In the preceding paragraph, he had compared his policies to Bill Clinton's, who'd asked "the wealthy to pay a little bit more" in taxes. This wasn't a request, however; it was an order.

At any rate, the results were splendid, according to Mr. Obama.

"We created 23 million new jobs, turned a deficit into a surplus, and rich people did just fine. We created a lot of millionaires."

Who is this "We" who created so many jobs and millionaires? It's the same We who hovers over the notorious sentences that Mr. Obama complains were ripped out of context. If "you've been successful, you didn't get there on your own," he said. And eight sentences later, "If you've got a business — you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen."

His defenders claim he was talking about "roads and bridges," mentioned in the preceding sentence. Fair enough, though in that case he should have said "you didn't build those." Perhaps his grammar slipped; but the meaning is clear enough.

Who is the "somebody else" who builds the roads and bridges, employs the "great teacher" you had, and invents the Internet? It's We, the government, and if you think your own intelligence or hard work played a decisive role in your success — well, you need more public schooling.

Paul Ryan is precisely correct, then, to criticize Obama for advocating "a government-centered society."

Few would disagree that government's job is to supply genuine public goods like roads, bridges and national security. But the president regards individual economic success as itself a kind of public good, and not primarily a matter of talent, insight, pluck and the vicissitudes of the marketplace.

How strange that the great advocate of "Yes, We Can" says to entrepreneurs, in effect, "No, You Didn't."

It's less strange when you consider his assertions in a still larger context, one that for political reasons he would rather ignore: American liberalism's long-standing criticism of individualism itself.

Writing at the dawn of modern liberalism, Woodrow Wilson argued that government didn't originate in a social contract between free and equal individuals, as the Declaration of Independence presumed, but instead grew out of primitive patriarchal and tribal relationships.

"Government came, so to say, before the individual." In the beginning, "the individual counted for nothing; society ... counted for everything." Any rights that individuals possessed came not from nature or God but from their membership in a group. There were no "individuals" by nature, hence no individual or natural rights.

When in advanced societies individual rights eventually emerged, they remained a by-product of group development. John Dewey put it bluntly:

"The laws and institutions are not means for obtaining something for individuals, even happiness. They are means of creating individuals. ... Individuality in a social and moral sense is something to be wrought out."

In other words, individuals do not create and ordain government; government creates and ordains individuals. "You didn't build that" because We built you! Each person, in liberalism's view, is a kind of ongoing government project.

In his influential form of this argument, John Rawls, whose book "A Theory of Justice" was all the rage at Harvard Law School when

Mr. Obama was a student, held that justice required imagining yourself in an "original position" behind "a veil of ignorance" occluding all knowledge of your talents, intelligence and interests.

The point was to encourage everyone to think of his abilities, virtues and possible economic success as disconnected from justice and somehow randomly distributed.

"There are a lot of smart people out there," after all, and "a whole bunch of hardworking people out there," too, to quote the president. He didn't want any American to take pride in individual merit because, as Rawls taught, no one really has a right to one's own talents or to other "advantages" like smarts or a work ethic.

Accordingly, you don't deserve to profit from these without giving something back, not out of charity or gratitude but, in effect, out of guilt over the arbitrary inequality of it all. Fairness requires, therefore, redistributing some of the proceeds of your luck to the "least advantaged," who are morally worthy even if some of them spend their days, as Rawls noted, idly counting blades of grass.

So you didn't build that because you, a free man or woman, either do not exist outside the fostering state or have no right to your own talents and accomplishments without begging the state's pardon. No wonder so many Americans rightly sensed the radicalism in

President Obama's Roanoke Doctrine. In context, it is even more apparent.

• Kesler teaches government at Claremont McKenna College. His new book, "I Am the Change: Barack Obama and the Crisis of Liberalism," was just published by HarperCollins (Broadside Books).

Tuesday, August 21, 2012

O's Twin Failures Iraq/Iran Bite

Obama's Twin Iran-Iraq Failures Metastasize


Posted 08/20/2012 07:02 PM ET
Mideast: Sanctions against Iran are even more ineffective than believed. Foolishly relying on them to stop Tehran's nuclear program, the president gave Baghdad license to help Iran evade the sanctions by leaving Iraq.
'To Obama's internationalist sensibility," former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton once wrote in Commentary magazine, "laws 'made in the U.S.A.' by freely elected representatives of our own citizenry are too 'exceptional' and too 'parochial' to hold weight in this interconnected world."
Paradoxically, it turns out that President Obama fails to understand the interconnected nature even of neighboring countries in the Middle East.
He never realized, for instance, that extracting the U.S. presence and influence in one volatile Muslim country — Iraq — would go gravely against the objectives of our policies next door, in the country with the most threatening regime in the world today — Iran.
The New York Times over the weekend reported that "for months, Iraq has been helping Iran skirt economic sanctions imposed on Tehran because of its nuclear program."
It turns out that Iraqi bankers have been neutralizing the already limited effects of U.S. and United Nations sanctions against the Islamofascist regime in Tehran. Iraq's government is apparently pretending not to notice "large financial flows, smuggling and other trade with Iran," with high-level Iraqis even "directly profiting from the activities."
Meanwhile, trade between Iran and Iraq is uncontrollable, reaching as much as $11 billion a year.
Obama last month announced that one Baghdad bank's connections with U.S. banks would be cut off, but U.S. and Iraqi government and banking officials told the Times that as many as four Iraqi banks might be under Iranian control.
And in obvious disregard for Obama, the Iraqi government continues allowing the institution the president targeted, Elaf Islamic Bank, to purchase U.S. dollars on a daily basis, thus allowing the Iranians to move large amounts of cash into the international banking system.
What's more, much of the money misused by Iran is actually under the U.S. government's nose, with approximately $60 billion of Iraqi central bank reserves at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
One Iraqi parliamentarian feared Iran's exploitation of Iraqi banks threatened Iraq's economy, because it was depleting Baghdad's foreign reserves, much of which come from huge oil revenues made possible by its U.S. liberation.
The Obama administration has apparently exacerbated this crisis. The U.S. privately told the Iraqi government that it "would not be found to be in violation of the new Iran sanctions," a former U.S. official told the Times.
As a result, "the Iraqi government has done little to stop a highly organized effort" — including the smuggling of Iraqi fuel oil into Iran "at extremely low prices with the help of government subsidies."
On top of that, "at least some Iranian oil is finding its way to Iraqi ports for export."
Why shouldn't the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki help its neighbor Iran at the expense of the U.S.? Uncle Sam hightailed it on the last train. America has left the Iraqi people to the wolves, so they might as well save themselves by making deals.
Consider all the implications here. Iran is insulating itself from the sanctions meant to stop its nuclear weapons program. Iraq's economy might be destabilized because of illicit exploitation of its banking system, draining it of cash.
Ultimately, an Iran that America allowed to become armed with nuclear weapons will dominate an Iraq we allowed to become economically and politically weakened.
Funny how the modern world's interconnections don't operate the way they're supposed to when a non-exceptionalist America shirks on its responsibilities.

Monday, August 20, 2012

O IS NOT for the Middle Class


Obama's Biggest Lie: 'I'm Fighting For The Middle Class'

 Posted 

Politics: The president has positioned himself as a "warrior for the middle class," fighting against a ruling class of one-percenters. But a new book says Obama is really at war with middle America.
In fact, Obama hates the American middle class and all it represents, according to "Spreading the Wealth" by Stanley Kurtz. The president is secretly scheming to destroy it where it lives: the suburbs.

Of course, we don't hear that from the campaign.

As part of his "Middle Class and the Economy" bus tour, Obama last week traveled to Iowa and visited with a middle-class family in Cedar Rapids. He sat down with the McLaughlins at their kitchen table in a one-story suburban home and exalted their "hard work" and "all the things that make up a middle-class life."

At the same time, his campaign released a TV ad championing middle-class values and casting himself as a "warrior" for the middle class.

"I believe that the way you grow the economy is from the middle out," Obama said, adding he will tax "millionaires and billionaires" to help out the struggling middle class. "I believe in fighting for the middle class."
Baloney, says Kurtz.

"Re-elect him and you'll see that he is after the pocketbooks of a whole lot more than just 1% of us," he warned in the book. "His real target is America's middle class, suburbanites in particular."
Added Kurtz, a senior fellow at the Ethics & Public Policy Center: "Many suburban voters now planning to support him will find their incomes and their children's schools the targets of his redistributive schemes in a second term. The 1% slogan is a sham. If your income is in the top 50%, Obama is after you."

Citing recent White House policy meetings with radical community organizers, Kurtz warns that Obama is saving his most jarring initiatives for a second term, when he no longer has to court the middle class.
They'll see "concerted moves to force regional tax-base sharing on the states," he said, "and federal pressure to equalize urban and suburban school funding."

Kurtz, an expert on Obama's community-organizing days, says the president is following the playbook of his philosophical mentor, Saul Alinsky.

The socialist Alinsky wrote in "Rules for Radicals" that the best way to revolutionize society is to convince the middle class you are on its side. That requires talking and dressing like that group of Americans while issuing bland slogans about "hope" and "change."

Friday, August 17, 2012

There Is No Hate Crime if Yo're a Liberal

Crickets Chirp When Leftist Hate Inspires Violence

 Posted 
Bias: A gay activist opens fire in a conservative organization's offices, inspired by the steady drumbeat of leftist vitriol against those who value traditional marriage, and no one says a word.

You won't hear any call for civil discourse from President Obama's bully pulpit over the shooting and wounding of a security guard at the offices of the conservative Family Research Council (FRC) in Washington, D.C.

The alleged shooter was a volunteer at a community center for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people, and the FRC favors traditional marriage.

Those who blamed Sarah Palin for the shooting of Congresswoman Gabriel Giffords or Rush Limbaugh for the Oklahoma City bombing
are strangely silent.

At least the likes of ABC's Brian Ross didn't reflexively blame the Tea Party, as he did after a gunman shot up an Aurora, Colo., movie theater.

On Tuesday, the Human Rights Campaign put on its blog a piece titled, "Paul Ryan Speaking at Hate Group's Annual Conference," referring to the FRC.

It said that the "FRC has been labeled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. It's a group that has advocated for the criminalization of homosexuality, called for LGBT people to be exported from the U.S., and has pushed dangerous lies trying to link being gay to pedophilia."

The FRC has done none of those things but that didn't stop the Daily Kos from vilifying the FRC for its support of Chick-fil-A: "Chick-fil-A's corporate 'charity' arm WinShape has donated millions of dollars to groups like Family Research Council. FRC doesn't just oppose marriage equality, they really do HATE gays."
 
Notice how those who hate apply the word so frequently to those who don't.

It took CNN two hours and 45 minutes before mentioning the shooting at the advocacy group's office 1.1 miles from the CNN D.C. bureau. On the NBC Nightly News, Brian Williams gave the story just 17 seconds, identifying FRC as a "conservative group" but not mentioning the affiliations and motive of the shooter.

MSNBC's Chris "Tingles" Matthews, who pinned the Giffords shooting squarely on Sarah Palin, said nothing.

No one died, thanks to the security guard who subdued the intruder and took a bullet in the process, but that does not explain the liberal silence.

Is it perhaps because his motivation was the hate speech of the left?The shooter had a political target and there are reports of his yelling about his opposition to FRC policies during the attack.

Friday, July 20, 2012

Budget Manuver to Avoid Taxadedon

The Budget Measure That Could Be A Godsend For Romney


Posted 07/19/2012 07:02 PM ET


Fiscal Cliff: Prominent Republicans are pushing a bright idea to prevent Democrats' promise of a post-election fiscal crisis: a stopgap funding measure that could also put Mitt Romney back on offense.

Some 20 GOP members of Congress — including John McCain and 10 other senators — are proposing a measure as sensible economically as it is smart politically.

Sens. Jim DeMint of South Carolina, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Marco Rubio of Florida and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, among others, have joined with congressmen like Jim Jordan of Ohio and Joe Wilson of South Carolina. All back the idea of passing, before August's recess, a six-month continuing resolution in the House of Representatives to fund the government into next year.

As the 20 lawmakers argue in a letter to House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell: "Then, Senate Republicans can force a vote on the CR, forcing Democrats to explain ... why they are seeking a government shutdown crisis."

These senators and representatives are convinced that "taking the threat of a government shutdown off the table will allow a serious debate about tax and spending policy before the elections."

As important, their stopgap resolution would temporarily prevent the expiration of the Bush tax cuts — the last thing the U.S. economy needs today.

DeMint, Johnson and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., cautioned Wednesday in a Washington Examiner article that "a series of terrible events will occur at or near the year's end if Congress does not act soon" — including indiscriminate defense cuts, expiration of Medicare payments to physicians and another debt-ceiling crisis.

Amid such orchestrated chaos, "Reid will do all he can to divide Republicans" and force them "into accepting a stopgap, temporary,
two-month government spending bill," forcing "a lame-duck session in late November or December ..."


 
Subscribe to the IBD Editorials Podcast


"That's when the real mischief can begin," the senators warn, when "under the gloomy cloud of yet another government shutdown, members of Congress who lose in the 2012 elections can freely vote to raise taxes, increase spending, pass international treaties, increase the debt limit and gut national defense."

At Thursday's meeting of Senate Republicans, McConnell was told he is naive to think a deal could be struck with Reid avoiding this calamity — especially since Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., chief fundraiser for Senate Democrats, just let it be known she would love to see such a fiscal crisis because it would hurt Republicans.

McConnell, Boehner and the Romney campaign are being urged to embrace this strategy. Romney could use it effectively by demanding that Obama dare to defend congressional Democrats' fiscal mischief.

Indeed it could do even more — by turning the spotlight on how Democrats have managed to spend us into oblivion and wreck the economy at the same time.

Wednesday, July 4, 2012

Govt. Motors: Tax Payers Lose $35mln

Government Motors: As GM shares near record low, taxpayer loss on bailout rises to $35 billion


By ED CARSON
Posted 07/03/2012 08:26 AM ET
Assembly line workers assemble Chevy Volt electric vehicles at the General Motors Detroit Hamtramck Assembly Plant in Hamtramck, Michigan. AP
Assembly line workers assemble Chevy Volt electric vehicles at the General Motors Detroit Hamtramck Assembly Plant in Hamtramck, Michigan. AP View Enlarged Image
To quote Lando Calrissian, this deal's getting worse all the time.

General Motors (GM) shares fell to a fresh 2012 closing low of 19.57 on Monday. The stock hit 19 in mid-December, the lowest since the auto giant came public at $33 in November 2010 following its June 2009 bankruptcy.

Normally you might say, tough luck investors. But this is Government Motors. The Treasury still owns 26.5% of GM, or 500 million shares. Taxpayers are still out $26.4 billion in direct aid. Shares would have to hit $53 for the government to break even.

Those shares were worth about $9.8 billion as of Monday. That would leave taxpayers with a loss of $16.6 billion.
But that's not the full tally. Obama let GM keep $45 billion in past losses to offset future profits. Those are usually wiped out or slashed, along with debts, in bankruptcy. But the administration essentially gifted $45 billion in write-offs (book value $18 billion) to GM. So when GM earned a $7.6 billion profit in 2011 (more on that below), it paid no taxes.
Include that $18 billion gift, and taxpayers' true loss climbs to nearly $35 billion.

Of course, there's no chance that the Obama administration will sell off its GM stake before Election Day. That would force Obama to recognize actual losses, which would remind voters that the bailout was a massive transfer from taxpayers to unions.

Union workers did make sacrifices in bankruptcy, but not nearly enough. GM only narrowed the labor cost gap vs. what Japanese automakers pay their workers. Given that Toyota (TM) still enjoys a price premium over similar GM vehicles, the U.S. auto giant needs a labor cost advantage, not near-parity. And Toyota has relatively high costs. Volkswagen(VLKAY) pays workers at its new Tennessee plant only about half what GM does.

The Volt hybrid was supposed to provide a green veneer to GM's entire lineup, like the Prius has done for Toyota. Instead, the Volt has been a p.r. disaster following fires and anemic sales that led to a temporary production halt earlier this year.

GM's market share and profits got an artificial boost in 2011 as Japan's earthquake and Thailand's massive floods wrecked havoc with supply chains for Toyota and other Japanese automakers. But with Toyota back on track and VW and Hyundai aggressively expanding in America, GM is rapidly losing share in 2012.

Overall U.S. auto sales were strong to start the year, but that momentum has faded along with slowing economic growth and hiring. Falling gas prices also may reduce the incentive to replace aging cars and trucks with higher-mileage vehicles. Automakers release U.S. June vehicle sales on Tuesday.
Update: GM's June sales rose 15.5% vs. a year earlier, much better than expected. But while retail sales rose 8%, lower-margin sales to car rental agencies and other fleets, shot up 36%. Still, GM shares rose 5.6% in holiday-shortened trading. But that only trimmed the bailout loss by about $550 million -- from nearly $35 billion to about $34 billion.

And the U.S. currently is the garden spot of Ceti Alpha 6 for auto sales.

Europe has become a sinkhole. The auto industry faced chronic overcapacity in Europe before the debt crisis erupted because national politics make it very hard to close any money-losing plant in any country. With Italy and Spain on the brink of a meltdown, auto sales in those countries are in freefall.

Ford (F) last week warned of major losses in Europe and other overseas markets.

GM has done well in China, now the world's No. 1 auto market, but that  economic growth is slowing there too. Meanwhile several big cities, including Beijing and Shanghai, are capping new car registrations to fight massive gridlock.
So don't expect GM's prospects to improve significantly in the near term. Obama says he saved GM and the U.S. auto industry for the "long term". But using taxpayer dollars to prop up a high-cost, low-premium producer in a mature market isn't a foundation for success.
Andrew Malcolm is on vacation. You can follow Ed Carson on Twitter (@EdCarson1) or Facebook.