{"id":355476,"date":"2018-04-06T07:50:54","date_gmt":"2018-04-06T06:50:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/a-lump-under-the-rug\/"},"modified":"2018-04-06T07:50:54","modified_gmt":"2018-04-06T06:50:54","slug":"a-lump-under-the-rug","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/a-lump-under-the-rug\/","title":{"rendered":"A Lump Under the Rug"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

The other day, GM announced it would no longer report monthly sales figures. Instead, it would hold on to those numbers internally and only reveal them publicly at the end of each quarter.<\/p>\n

A GM spokesman says that \u201cthirty days is not enough time to separate real sales trends from short-term fluctuations in the market.\u201d<\/p>\n

Possibly.<\/p>\n

But 90 days\u00a0\u00a0\u2013 a quarter is three months \u2013 is just as arguably too long to give\u00a0shareholders<\/em>\u00a0an opportunity to act\u00a0before<\/em>\u00a0they potentially lose their shirts. The obvious example here being the economic implosion of 2007. If you\u2019d waited three months to dump your GM stock back then, you\u2019d have lost a lot of money.<\/p>\n

Granted, other corporations also report quarterly. But the car business is much more of a barometer of the overall health of the economy than, say, Boeing \u2013 whose profits depend largely on a relative handful of big-ticket buys by other large corporations (and the government) rather than hundreds of thousands of small ones by private individuals.<\/p>\n

Now, here\u2019s where things get interesting \u2013 in the Chinese proverb sense.<\/p>\n


\n\"\"<\/a><\/span><\/span>
\nHOW TO BUY A CAR Witho…<\/a><\/span><\/span>
\nMr Jay Hamilton<\/span>
\nBest Price: <\/span>$10.04<\/span><\/span>
\nBuy New <\/span>$9.88<\/span><\/span>
\n(as of 02:04 EDT – Details<\/span>)<\/span><\/span>
\n<\/a><\/span>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

The change in reporting coincides with\u00a0another<\/em>\u00a0change in the car business.<\/p>\n

There hasn\u2019t been much reporting of it, but loan-issuing standards have all of a sudden been tightening up. Interest rates are going up. Free loans \u2013 i.e., zero percent financing \u2013 are going away. The average rate on a new car loan is up to 5.7 percent now \u2013\u00a0the highest since 2009<\/a>.<\/p>\n

That means higher monthly payments. But that\u2019s a problem when people can only afford so much per month. It\u2019s been free (or very low cost) loans which have kept sales of new cars propped up for…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The other day, GM announced it would no longer report monthly sales figures. Instead, it would hold on to those numbers internally and only reveal them publicly at the end of each quarter. A GM spokesman says that \u201cthirty days is not enough time to separate real sales trends from short-term fluctuations in the market.\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-355476","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/355476","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=355476"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/355476\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=355476"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=355476"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=355476"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}