Volvo truck sales down 99.63%
Mish is such a misery guts these days:
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2008/10/volvo-truck-orders-decline-9963-percent.html
Apparently Volvo sold only 0.37% of the sales it made in the same quarter last year.
Meanwhile the US fed is doing swaps with Brazil, Mexico, South Korea, Singapore, which I think it means it is swapping US$ for Singapore $, Mexican pesetas etc.. I assume they simply printed a lot more US$ and are now trying to find ways to stuff them into the world system without a collapse in the value of the US$, so they're swapping them for hard(er) currency. Since they're not doing that swap with Europe or UK or Japan, I guess we've had enough of it.
Mish suggests it's a loan to them, but I don't see that they need lending at this point.
Bernankes and Paulsons of this world can see no problem with the massive increases in US money supply. Given M3 was hidden in 2006, I guess they thought they could keep it going for 2 years till the idiot was out of power.
IMHO, the US economy needs to shrink by $3-5 trillion (the amount of the false loans plus the fees from credit derivatives from those bad loans), and we all need to take a little pain while that happens.
Or they could flood the world with US$ hoping it will create real growth somewhere, anywhere. Unlike all the previous times they flooded the world with US$ and created fake bubbles of fake assets.... like the bubble that's bursting now. Yeh, if you create more money for the same worth, engineers will invent something that sells to create growth, the economics of wishful thinking....
They should have impeached him back in 2006 instead of letting him stay in power for another 2 years.
/rant