Category: Auto Industry

Toyota USA Needs a Major Management Shakeup

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This car model from Toyota has taken on a new meaning. pic.twitter.com/dNLMI9GhnC

— MeidasTouch.com (@MeidasTouch) June 28, 2021

Best Tweet on the Subject

Because the car manufacturer leads in campaign donations to members of the “Sedition Caucus” since January 6. 

I understand the need for companies to spread the campaign donations around, I’ve always felt that the current system is more extortion than it is bribery, but you can donate to Republicans without being the single most aggressive of people who supported the insurrection at the Capitol:

Nearly three-dozen corporate PACs have donated at least $5,000 to Republicans who objected to certifying the 2020 election, yet Toyota leads by a substantial margin.

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By the numbers: Data compiled by the left-leaning watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington show Toyota gave $55,000 to 37 GOP objectors this year.

  • That equates to a quarter of the bloc that voted to nullify President Biden’s win after the Capitol siege.

  • Toyota gave more than twice as much — and to nearly five times as many members of Congress — as the No. 2 company on the list, Cubic Corp., a San Diego-based defense contractor.

  • The Japanese automaker’s donations this year included a February contribution to Rep. Andy Biggs, an Arizona Republican who has been one of Congress’ most vocal election conspiracy theorists. According to an organizer of the “Stop the Steal” rally prior to the Capitol attack, Biggs also helped put on that event, a charge Biggs has denied.

What they’re saying: “We do not believe it is appropriate to judge members of Congress solely based on their votes on the electoral certification,” a Toyota spokesperson said in a statement emailed to Axios. 

This is a bummer.  

I have a 2004 Toyota Prius with about  ¼ million miles on it, and I like the car, I consider it my midlife crisis car,* but it is getting long in the tooth, and it’s getting to be time to find a replacement.

I WAS considering a newer Prius, possibly a Prime plug-in, but I try to avoid buying from companies with stupid and psychotic management.  (It’s actually it’s a REMARKABLY high bar to clear with American management these days.)

Any recommendations from my reader(s) for a decent reliable high MPG car not from Toyota?

*Yeah, a 2004 Prius as my midlife crisis car. I am the dullest motherf%$#er on the face of the earth.

Yes, Lying about Self Driving Cars Is a Bad Thing, Elon

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The NTSB has called out Elon Musk and Tesla for serial lying about their self driving capabilityes, saying that this puts the driving public at risk.

This is not a surprise. 

Tesla’s culture comes from the height of the Dot Com bubble, with a, “We’ll fix it in Beta,” mentality, which is negligent at best, and potentially criminal when dealing with 4000 pound high speed death machines like automobiles:

The National Transportation Safety Board has filed comments blasting the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration for its permissive regulation of driver-assistance systems. The letter was dated February 1 but was only spotted by CNBC’s Lora Kolodny on Friday. The letter repeatedly calls out Tesla’s Autopilot for its lax safety practices and calls on NHTSA to establish minimum standards for the industry.

The dispute between federal agencies is the result of Congress dividing responsibility for transportation safety among multiple agencies. NHTSA is the main regulator for highway safety: every car and light truck must comply with rules established by NHTSA. NTSB is a separate agency that just does safety investigations. When there’s a high-profile highway crash, NTSB investigators travel to the scene to figure out what happened and how to prevent it from happening again. NTSB also does plane crashes and train wrecks, allowing it to apply lessons from one mode of transportation to others.

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Under then-President Donald Trump, NHTSA largely let automakers do what they liked when it came to advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) and prototype driverless vehicles. NHTSA has generally waited until safety problems cropped up with ADAS systems and dealt with them after the fact. NTSB argues NHTSA should be more proactive, and it put Tesla and Autopilot at the center of its argument.

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The NTSB also calls for NHTSA to require driver-monitoring systems to ensure drivers are paying attention to the road while driver-assistance systems are active.

“Because driver attention is an integral component of lower-level automation systems, a driver-monitoring system must be able to assess whether and to what degree the driver is performing the role of automation supervisor,” NTSB argued. “No minimum performance standards exist for the appropriate timing of alerts, the type of alert, or the use of redundant monitoring sensors to ensure driver engagement.”

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Finally, NTSB argues that NHTSA should require automakers to limit use of driver-assistance systems to the types of roads they’re designed for. For example, some ADAS systems are designed to only work on limited-access freeways. Yet few cars actually enforce such limitations. Many systems can be activated on roads the systems weren’t designed for.

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The NTSB mentions Tesla 16 times in the report—far more than any other automaker. This is partly because Tesla vehicles have figured so prominently in the NTSB’s work. NTSB says it has investigated six crashes involving driver-assistance or self-driving systems between May 2016 and March 2019. Four of those were fatal. One of these four was the 2018 death of Elaine Herzberg after she was hit by an Uber self-driving prototype. The other three were Tesla owners who relied too much on Autopilot, and it cost them their lives.

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In its report on the crash, NTSB noted that, at the time of the crash, Autopilot software was only designed for use on controlled-access freeways—not rural highways where cars and trucks can enter the highway directly from driveways and side streets. NTSB pointed out that its report on the Brown crash “recommended that NHTSA develop a method to verify” that companies selling driver-assistance systems like Autopilot have safeguards to prevent customers from using the systems on roads they aren’t designed for. Such a system might have prevented Brown from activating Autopilot on the day of his death.

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“The NTSB remains concerned about NHTSA’s continued failure to recognize the importance of ensuring that acceptable safeguards are in place so the vehicles do not operate outside of their operational design domains and beyond the capabilities of their system designs,” the agency wrote. “Because NHTSA has put in place no requirements, manufacturers can operate and test vehicles virtually anywhere, even if the location exceeds the AV control system’s limitations.”

NTSB then called out Tesla again, specifically criticizing the decision to release its “full self-driving beta” software to a few-dozen customers.

“Tesla recently released a beta version of its Level 2 Autopilot system, described as having full self-driving capability,” NTSB wrote. “By releasing the system, Tesla is testing on public roads a highly automated AV technology but with limited oversight and reporting requirements.”

This is negligent behavior, both on the part of Tesla and on the part of the NHTSA, and it has already gotten people killed.

Rule 1 of Regulating Businesses: Businesses Will Lie to Avoid Regulation

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Rule 2 is, “See Rule 1.”

Case in point, when faced with the prospect of regulation enforcing a right to repair, John Deere lied when it said that future products would allow for more maintenance to be performed by the farmers themselves.

These products are out now, and they are not user-repairable, and intentionally designed not to be user repairable:

In September 2018, a trade group that represents John Deere and a series of other tractor and agricultural equipment manufacturers made a promise intended to stave off increasing pressure from their customers and to prevent lawmakers from passing what they said would be onerous repair regulations. They vowed that, starting January 1, 2021, Deere and other tractor manufacturers would make repair tools, software, and diagnostics available to the masses.

This “statement of principles,” as it was called at the time, was nominally designed to address concerns from farmers that their tractors were becoming increasingly unrepairable due to pervasive software-based locks that artificially prevented them from fixing their equipment. As Motherboard repeatedly reported at the time, farmers were being forced to go to “authorized” John Deere dealerships and service centers to perform otherwise simple repairs that they could no longer do because they were locked out of their equipment and needed special software to unlock it. To get around this, some farmers had begun hacking their tractors with cracked software from Ukraine.

A host of states were considering “right to repair” legislation that would have compelled Deere and other manufacturers to abandon these artificial software locks, to make repair tools and guides available to the general public, and to, broadly speaking, allow farmers to fix the tractors they owned.

Deere, the Association of Equipment Manufacturers (the lobbying group that represents Deere and several other large manufacturers), and the Equipment Dealers Association announced this “commitment” to farmers in order to prevent any of this legislation from passing; the thinking was that if manufacturers like Deere provided some of the things that right to repair legislation would have required, they could explain to lawmakers that these bills (which provided more consumer control) weren’t actually necessary.

This was a big deal in the farm world. In California, The Far West Equipment Dealers Association (which represents authorized dealers in seven western states) signed a “Memorandum of Understanding” with the California Farm Bureau that enshrined this statement of principles, printed out a giant poster of it, and then displayed it in a signing ceremony and photo-op. It was seen as a grand compromise, and farmers were the winners.

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It is now three years later. The agreement is supposed to be in effect. No right to repair legislation has been passed. Deere, the dealers, and the manufacturers got what they wanted. And, yet, farmers are still struggling to get anything promised in the agreement.

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Kerry Sheehan, iFixit’s head of US policy, points out that currently, the “only John Deere repair tools we can find” are these children’s toys.

David Ward, a spokesperson for the AEM, the manufacturers’ lobbying and trade group that often represents John Deere, told Motherboard that “Equipment manufacturers support farmers right to repair their equipment. Comprehensive repair and diagnostic information is now available for the vast majority of the tractor and combine market through authorized dealers. While we do not track it, specific information on pricing varies based on manufacturer.” A follow-up email from Motherboard that asked if he could point to a single instance where this is actually the case, or a single manufacturer that explains to farmers where they can get this information or these tools, was unreturned.

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New sensors and software in tractors have led to this problem. For decades, many farmers did their own repairs. By-and-large, they can no longer do this: the proliferation of onboard computers and fancy equipment in newer models of tractors and combine harvesters has made it hard for farmers to repair the tools they need to keep the country fed.

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The problem is that farmers often don’t have access to the diagnostic software and repair tools they need to make the fix. According to U.S. PIRG, the John Deere S760 combine harvester has 125 different computer sensors in it. If those sensors start throwing an error code, the combine won’t run and the farmer doesn’t have immediate access to the tools they need to fix the problem.

“It doesn’t matter how industrious they are, what their planting window looks like, or if their tractor goes down right as weather threatens to destroy their crop—modern farming equipment is designed so that farmers need to call the dealership to repair their machines,” O’Reilly said.

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The problem with new machines is so bad that farmers are taking drastic action to repair their own equipment. Some have become hackers, using software and tools they’ve found online to diagnose and repair their equipment. Others are buying 40-year old tractors because they still function and they’re more repairable than new models.

As an aside, these “40-year old tractors” are now selling for more money than their newer counterparts.

As the problem has become more pronounced, legislators are trying to pass right-to-repair laws that would help farmers repair their own equipment. LC 1562 in Montana is one example, a simple piece of legislation that would make it easier for farmers to access the information they need to make repairs.

“What the bill does, overall, is give the owner the ability to purchase the diagnostic tools to make repairs themselves, saving time and money,” Katie Sullivan, a Missoula area state representative said during the town hall. “It supports farmers who don’t have the time to wait for mechanics or have the extra money to spend just to fix a small issue.”

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Deere has claimed that it can’t allow farmers access to the computer system at this level because it’s a security risk and might lead to farmers breaking federal law. “Sometimes, these modifications can be altered and now the machine is not functioning as it was intended,” Vancil said at a webinar about right to repair with the Florida Farm Bureau last week. “It also starts getting into some areas, if you’re talking about emissions, that get into the area where you start having federal topics being introduced from an emissions standpoint.”

This is the same reasoning used by car manufacturers in their attempts to hamstring independent car repair shops.

It is, and remains, complete bullsh%$.

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It would not be difficult for John Deere and other manufacturers to comply with a right to repair law, or, at the very least, to abide by its own promise. Europe has had some right to repair regulations which require “standardized access to repair and maintenance information (RMI) systems to provide repair and maintenance information for vehicles used in agriculture and forestry” since 2013, and manufacturers comply with those.

And so the solution in the United States seems like it’s going to have to be the same. Not a promise from manufacturers and dealers, but legislation with the force of law.

As is always the case, with profit driven businesses.

They will not voluntarily cede a revenue stream, even if it is unfair and abusive, until such time as they are forced to through statute or regulation.

Oh Crap

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One of GM’s suppliers just went chapter 11, and it has the potential to shut down automobile assembly across General Motors:

A Massachusetts supplier that filed for bankruptcy protection last week could disrupt production at nearly every General Motors North American plant in coming days, according to documents filed in bankruptcy court.

Clark-Cutler-McDermott, based in Franklin, Mass., supplies acoustic insulation and interior trim products for automobiles, textiles and other transportation manufacturers. But GM is its largest customer and Clark-Cutler-McDermott is losing more than $30,000 a day — and more than $12 million since 2013 — partly because what GM pays for those components “usually decreases annually,” CEO James McDermott stated in a court filing.

But GM has no other supplier for the parts CCM provided and any interruption in delivery of those parts would cost the automaker “millions of dollars per day per plant,” GM said in another filing.

GM obtained a restraining order last month compelling CCM to continue supplying those items specified in its purchase orders with GM. But that order expired July 1. CCM filed for protection under Chapter 11 of federal bankruptcy law on July 7.

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In a separate dispute, CCM wants to use $1.9 million of cash it held when it filed for bankruptcy to pay its workers. GM contends it provided most of that cash as part of its temporary restraining order.

GM doesn’t object to CCM paying workers for what was produced before the bankruptcy filing, but it does not want its cash used to pay workers if they aren’t making GM’s parts.

This could get very messy very quickly.

A lot of plants are retooling for the new model year right now, but if they lack the parts to reopen, we are going to see some major issues with the economy just as the presidential election ramps up, particularly in the Midwest.

It’s the Insurance, Stupid

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We have yet another article wondering why fewer people are getting drivers licenses these days:

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Young people are not getting driver’s licenses so much anymore. In fact, no one is. According to a new study by Michael Sivak and Brandon Schoettle at the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute, the percentage of people with a driver’s license decreased between 2011 and 2014, across all age groups. For people aged 16 to 44, that percentage has been decreasing steadily since 1983.

It’s especially pronounced for the teens—in 2014, just 24.5 percent of 16-year-olds had a license, a 47-percent decrease from 1983, when 46.2 percent did. And at the tail end of the teen years, 69 percent of 19-year-olds had licenses in 2014, compared to 87.3 percent in 1983, a 21-percent decrease.

Among young adults, the declines are smaller but still significant—16.4 percent fewer 20-to-24-year-olds had licenses in 2014 than in 1983, 11 percent fewer 25-to-29-year-olds, 10.3 percent fewer 30-to-34-year-olds, and 7.4 percent fewer 35-to-39-year-olds. For people between 40 and 54, the declines were small, less than 5 percent.

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Maybe it’s just that people today have more things they’d rather do than practice parallel parking between traffic cones. Or maybe it’s because the photos on those plastic cards are almost never flattering. Sivak and Schoettle are hoping to soon study possible reasons for the drop in driver’s licenses. But regardless of the cause, it seems that if you want to insult a teen today, shaming them for not being able to operate a motor vehicle might not be the way to go.

It’s not difficult to understand.

The FIRE (Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate) sector has been sitting athwart our economy sucking the marrow out of its bones for a very long time, and it appears that the insurance industry has finally reached a level where it’s breaking up America’s love affair with the automobile.

All in all, it’s king of a mixed emotions thing here.  The insurance industry and auto industry have both done a lot to f%$# up our country.

If only they could both lose.

There May Still Be Some Utility Left in the Mk. 1 Human

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Toyota has discovered that robots cannot do it all, and that they need highly experienced experts to maximize the productivity at their plants:

Inside Toyota Motor Corp.’s oldest plant, there’s a corner where humans have taken over from robots in thwacking glowing lumps of metal into crankshafts. This is Mitsuru Kawai’s vision of the future.

“We need to become more solid and get back to basics, to sharpen our manual skills and further develop them,” said Kawai, a half century-long company veteran tapped by President Akio Toyoda to promote craftsmanship at Toyota’s plants. “When I was a novice, experienced masters used to be called gods, and they could make anything.”

These gods, or “kami-sama” in Japanese, are making a comeback at Toyota, the company that long set the pace for manufacturing prowess in the auto industry and beyond. Toyota’s next step forward is counterintuitive in an age of automation: Humans are taking the place of machines in plants across the nation so workers can develop new skills and figure out ways to improve production lines and the car-building process.

“Toyota views their people who work in a plant like this as craftsmen who need to continue to refine their art and skill level,” said Jeff Liker, who has written eight books on Toyota and visited Kawai last year. “In almost every company you would visit, the workers’ jobs are to feed parts into a machine and call somebody for help when it breaks down.”

The return of the kami-sama is emblematic of how Toyoda, 57, is remaking the company founded by his grandfather as the chief executive officer has pledged to tilt priorities back toward quality and efficiency from a growth mentality. He’s reining in expansion at the world’s-largest automaker with a three-year freeze on new car plants.

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“What Akio Toyoda feared the company lost when it was growing so fast was the time to struggle and learn,” said Liker, who met with Toyoda in November. “He felt Toyota got big-company disease and was too busy getting product out.”

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Learning how to make car parts from scratch gives younger workers insights they otherwise wouldn’t get from picking parts from bins and conveyor belts, or pressing buttons on machines. At about 100 manual-intensive workspaces introduced over the last three years across Toyota’s factories in Japan, these lessons can then be applied to reprogram machines to cut down on waste and improve processes, Kawai said.

In an area Kawai directly supervises at the forging division of Toyota’s Honsha plant, workers twist, turn and hammer metal into crankshafts instead of using the typically automated process. Experiences there have led to innovations in reducing levels of scrap and shortening the production line 96 percent from its length three years ago.

Toyota has eliminated about 10 percent of material-related waste from building crankshafts at Honsha. Kawai said the aim is to apply those savings to the next-generation Prius hybrid.

The work extends beyond crankshafts. Kawai credits manual labor for helping workers at Honsha improve production of axle beams and cut the costs of making chassis parts.

Though Kawai doesn’t envision the day his employer will rid itself of robots — 760 of them take part in 96 percent of the production process at its Motomachi plant in Japan — he has introduced multiple lines dedicated to manual labor in each of Toyota’s factories in its home country, he said.

“We cannot simply depend on the machines that only repeat the same task over and over again,” Kawai said. “To be the master of the machine, you have to have the knowledge and the skills to teach the machine.”

True dat.

Guys on the shop floor are an invaluable source of knowledge and wisdom.

Today in IP Insanity

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Automakers are petitioning the Library of Congress prevent backyard mechanics from repairing their own cars:

Automakers are supporting provisions in copyright law that could prohibit home mechanics and car enthusiasts from repairing and modifying their own vehicles.

In comments filed with a federal agency that will determine whether tinkering with a car constitutes a copyright violation, OEMs and their main lobbying organization say cars have become too complex and dangerous for consumers and third parties to handle.

Allowing them to continue to fix their cars has become “legally problematic,” according to a written statement from the Auto Alliance, the main lobbying arm of automakers.

The dispute arises from a section of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that no one thought could apply to vehicles when it was signed into law in 1998. But now, in an era where cars are rolling computing platforms, the U.S. Copyright Office is examining whether provisions of the law that protect intellectual property should prohibit people from modifying and tuning their cars.

Every three years, the office holds hearings on whether certain activities should be exempt from the DMCA’s section 1201, which governs technological measures that protect copyrighted work. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit organization that advocates for individual rights in the digital world, has asked the office to ensure that enthusiasts can continue working on cars by providing exemptions that would give them the right to access necessary car components.

This is under the anti-counterfeiting provisions of the DMCA, which not only prevents copying, it prevents “unauthorized access”, and the auto industry is attempting to lock down their cars to the backyard mechanic, and possibly the independent mechanics as well.

Do you want to have no alternative to price gouging by the dealer on maintenance?

Buy a Truck, Because Your Penis is Too Small

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Advertising, Exploiting People with Insecurity About Their Manhood for more than a Century

In the conflation of automobiles and manhood that is the American car advertisement, the latest GM ad, which doesn’t even bother making the juxtaposition between one’s choice in transportation and one’s manhood, and they pretty explicitly state it.

The video attached shows hoe they bring in a “focus group” of young women who look at pictures, and they universally find the guy in front of a truck sexier than the same guy in front of a hatchback.

First, they obviously had to find a group of women dumb enough not to think, “Hey, these are the same guys?  Are you trying to imply that I am a vacuous shallow bitch?”

Seriously. Just how tiny does a potential car buyer’s penis have to be for this ad to work?

Pig Felching Rat Bastards of the Day

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Ford Motor Company, who fired about 100 workers by robocall over this weekend:

Nearly 100 workers at Ford’s Chicago Assembly Plant got a robocall on Halloween telling them their services were no longer needed and they were terminated.

It wasn’t a trick or a morbid prank.

Dozens of workers missed the call or didn’t believe it, so they showed up to work Saturday anyway, according to an autoworker who wished to remain anonymous. They found their ID badges had been disabled and were told by security they had been fired.

“As part of our normal business process, we’ve temporarily adjusted our workforce numbers at Chicago Assembly Plant,” Ford Motor Co. said in a statement.

Remember what I said about honey and rabid wolverines?

HR at Ford should get this treatment too.

What, You Mean that the Union has Seats on the VW Board of Directors?!?!?!?

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The head of the union at Volkswagon is saying that the the labor environment in the South means that VW should conduct future expansion elsewhere.

Seeing as how labor unions effectively control a majority of the seats on the board, this looks to revealing Senator Bob Corker, who claimed that VW told him that not having a union was key to expansion, to be a lying sack of sh%$:

Volkswagen’s top labor representative threatened on Wednesday to try to block further investments by the German carmaker in the southern United States if its workers there are not unionized.

Workers at VW’s factory in Chattanooga, Tennessee, last Friday voted against representation by the United Auto Workers union (UAW), rejecting efforts by VW representatives to set up a German-style works council at the plant.

German workers enjoy considerable influence over company decisions under the legally enshrined “co-determination” principle which is anathema to many politicians in the U.S. who see organized labor as a threat to profits and job growth.

Chattanooga is VW’s only factory in the U.S. and one of the company’s few in the world without a works council.

“I can imagine fairly well that another VW factory in the United States, provided that one more should still be set up there, does not necessarily have to be assigned to the south again,” said Bernd Osterloh, head of VW’s works council.

“If co-determination isn’t guaranteed in the first place, we as workers will hardly be able to vote in favor” of potentially building another plant in the U.S. south, Osterloh, who is also on VW’s supervisory board, said.

The 20-member panel – evenly split between labor and management – has to approve any decision on closing plants or building new ones.

Here’s a thought: If you want to locate a plant in a 3rd world country, actually set it up in a real 3rd world country, as opposed to the 3rd world country wannabees in the south.

10½ Years?

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Duncan Black teases out this rather alarming factoid:

Bernanke Money Policy Seen Achieving Goal as Savers Become Consumers Again

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The average age of cars and light trucks on the road today has risen to 10.6 years, Jenny Lin, senior U.S. economist at Dearborn, Michigan-based Ford Motor Co., said on a Dec. 1 conference call. That’s above the seven-to-7.5 years Ballew says is the long-term average.

The number has been trending up for years, notwithstanding what Ms. Lin said, but a 1.2 year increase since 2008 is a big jump for just 3 years.

Here’s something to think about: That number is never going back, because people are used to keeping their cars longer now, and the technological advances over the past couple of decades allow them to.

Cars are a lot better than they were 20 years ago, and they last a lot longer.

And Still, They Blather About the Deficit

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ADP’s private payroll report showed an increase of only 38,000 in May, which, when you consider the obvious cuts in state and local payrolls, and lord knows what in the non-profit sector, means that we are looking about a decline in the workforce if the federal numbers come close to matching this report.

Additionally, the Conference Board’s consumer confidence report fell, and auto sales fell for all the major auto manufacturers.

And still the Democrats are buying into the Republican meme that our problem is the deficit.

To quote Robin Williams, “Shazbat!”

Credit Where Credit is Due

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The White House has come out against letting auto dealers cheat their customers.

To quote the first few ‘graphs of the official statement:

Later this afternoon, the Senate will vote on a motion to instruct conferees on the Brownback Amendment. That basically means members of the Senate will cast a nonbinding vote on whether or not they think the House and Senate conferees should consider carving out a loophole for auto dealers that make auto loans from the financial reform bill.

The President has been clear on this issue, repeatedly urging members of the Senate to fight efforts of the special interests and their lobbyists to weaken consumer protections. The fact is, auto dealer-lending is an $850 billion industry, which is larger than the entire credit card industry and they make nearly 80 percent of the automobile loans in our country.

Is there any question that these lenders should be subject to the same standards as any local or community bank that provides loans?

This is the right thing to do.

Economics Update (For the Week)

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Click for full size


Employment/Population Ratio Still at 1983 Levels


Long-term unemployment is still at a 40+ Year high


Personal bankruptcies on level with pre-bankruptcy reform numbers (H/t Calculated Risk)

Well, we have the employment numbers for March out now, and the March non-farm payroll numbers (NFP) rose by 162,000, with unemployment (U3)remaining at 9.7%, and the broader U6 unemployment number remained basically flat, increasing from 16.8% to 16.9% (seasonally adjusted).

This is an improvement. It’s the largest NFP jump in 3 years.

That being said, some things to note:

  • The US Census hired 48,000 temp employees in March.
  • You need about 150,000 new jobs each month to accommodate people entering the workforce.
  • Some of this may be hiring from prior months that was delayed because of the various snowpocalypse weather events that occurred.
  • Long term unemployment increased.
  • Involuntary part time employment increased (largely why U6 is up)

About 8 million people have lost jobs in this recessions, and at a NFP payroll increase of 162K a month, it would take more than 50 years for everyone who lost their jobs to get another job, so while it is an improvement, things are at best treading water, but the trend does appear to be getting better.

Still, the employment/population ratio is at a 27 year low, and long term unemployment is at a 40+ year high.

Also, we have

Still, all in all, I have to say that we are seeing a recovery, but it’s a feeble and fragile recovery.

We still have some areas of concern, most notably that construction spending fell once again, and personal bankruptcies rose sharply.

I Said that This Would Happen

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I said that there would be blowback when GM decided not to sell Opel and suck up all the state aid itself, and it appears taht I was right

We are now seeing that the taskforce reviewing GM’s plans with Opel is saying that, they are inadequate, and aid should not be awarded:

General Motors’ restructuring plan for Opel/Vauxhall has been dealt a potentially serious setback on Wednesday after a German government taskforce said it had doubts about the scheme.

The US carmaker presented the turnaround plan for its lossmaking European operations last week and formally applied to Berlin for €1.5bn ($2bn) in loans or guarantees – the biggest portion of the €3.3bn it says it needs to finance its plan.

However, the federal task force advising Berlin on GM’s plans has deemed the proposals “unqualified for government loan guarantees”, three officials in German states with GM plants told the Financial Times on Wednesday.

(emphasis mine)

Part of the reason for this, though it is not explicitly spoken, is the belief that GM will strip mine Opel to support its US operations.

There has been a tepid denial from the board about this report, but I’m inclined to believe that they want guarantees that the money is not going to Detroit.