benj

General Motors has finally filed for bankruptcy yesterday. They’re looking at getting out of it in 60-90 days, which is unrealistic in my book seeing as how GM is a much more complicated case compared to Chrysler. So the years of shoddy workmanship and their refusal to listen to the needs of the market has finally caught up with them. They say that GM will come out of this as a leaner and more efficient company. But if they still somehow cling to the same ideals they have in the past, then I think we can expect them to stay unprofitable for a significant number of years to come.

One minor good thing that comes out of this though is that you can get GM halo cars such as the Corvette for a very low price nowadays. If only I had the money…

This website has a pretty good coverage of Berkshire Hathaway’s annual shareholders’ meeting that happened in Omaha Nebraska this past weekend:

http://www.cnbc.com/id/30557253

Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger made several points that are too much to summarize in one post. But I am relieved to hear them still bullish about Wells Fargo, WFC stock was up 23% yesterday.

I came across these pretty cool images on the net. Some guy decided to illustrate what 1 trillion dollars actually looks like, in light of all this talk about bailouts amounting to at least that amount.

Here’s a $10,000 bundle (100 pcs of $100 bills)

Here’s a million dollars (100 packets of $10,000) -> I think there’s something wrong with this pic, it doesn’t look like 100 packets…

(more…)

I was watching CNBC Squawk Box again last night when the news came, AIG posted a record loss for the 4th quarter 2008 to the tune of $62 Billion (around 3 Trillion Pesos)!!! That is the biggest quarterly loss ever recorded by any company in history! That is more than the entire net worth of America’s richest man Bill Gates (who’s worth around $57 Billion).

(more…)

I have this new nightly habit of watching the CNBC show Squawk Box for news about the economy. It’s an interesting program with a bunch of very knowledgeable hosts and guests. It’s also actually very entertaining considering the topics that they discuss, it sure beats getting bored to death watching Bloomberg.

Anyway, I was watching it the other night and it reported that General Motors Corp., the 2nd largest automaker in the world and manufacturers of cars such as Chevrolet, GMC, Hummer, and Daewoo, among others, posted a loss of $30.9 Billion Dollars last 2008. This equates to them losing roughly $84.7 Million in a day! Think about it, that’s 4.1 Billion Pesos everyday! If that doesn’t blow your mind I don’t know what will. The amount that they lost last 2008 is more or less equal to the entire GDP of the Philippines. That means if we measure the total value of all final goods and services produced in the Philippines in 2008, we would more or less get the value of what GM lost last year.

(more…)