InfiniteCompetition.com

Manufacturers have become so good at making millions of highly reliable vehicles that the world is awash in them.  And this was true before the recent financial melt down, and is still before China begins producing and exporting decent vehicles (only a matter of time).

Not only are there way too many new cars coming on the market, but since cars a few years old are still incredibly useful, new cars must compete with these used cars too.

With so many manufacturers, in so many places, competing for so few buyers armed with so much information, we are approaching infinite automotive competition.

What does this mean?  Great deals for consumers.  Brutal business conditions for auto makers with no end EVER in sight.  Vehicles are truly a commodity, with a vast over-supply.  Only the strong will survive.

Manufacturers will have to clearly focus on one or at most two of the following: product, price, or service.  No one can win in all three for any given brand.

A good time to be a consumer.  A very bad time to be in the auto business.

Who knew that Icelandic banks were doing the same kind of investing in mortgage backed derivatives as U.S. banks, and that U.K. consumers banked at Icelandic banks, and U.K. local governments invested in Icelandic bank investments.  And who knew that Iceland’s banks became vastly bigger in deposits and obligations than the Icelandic government could support?

The BBC has written extensively on this mess and what it means.  Iceland’s banking system and government could well declared bankruptcy which would set that nation’s economy back years.

It is but one tragic fall out of the world of infinite banking.  Where investments become infinitely complex, and in most cases unregulated.  Money is moving at infinite speed around the globe, in millions of transactions per second.  How can ANY government regulate or monitor this?  And that is without considering all the CRIMINAL movement of money.

Speed ‘governors’ will probably be needed to slow down the movement of money around the world, so that alarms, indicators, and firewalls can be put in place to warn and potentially stop things getting out of control.

It will need the best financial and mathematical minds to work together to come up with new standards.  Will it happen?  Who knows.

The current financial crisis has been a long time coming.  The country is now reaping the results of decades of effort to evade economic cause and effect. Some government debt is understandable and often desirable as a means to accomplish a lofty goal (like borrow money to build a highway and pay it back through transportation tax income).

But the U.S. Federal government took things to a whole new level in the 1990’s by demanding that banks make loans to unqualified low and no income persons.  Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae supposedly would buy all these loans off the banks until one day they couldn’t!

With the government backed Freddie and Fannie distorting the market, Wall St. and in turn banks around the world, created distorted and outrageous financial derivatives around all these millions of mortgages, offering ‘great returns’ and great ratings, even though those ratings were not based on reality.

Well, the house of cards fell, bringing down not only the major investment banking scoundrels, but also many large and small banks that went along for the ride, caught up in the “well if they’re doing it I guess I need to be doing it too, to compete!”

The U.S. government created near INFINITE COMPETITION in banking and financial markets which is why NO ONE can understand the extent of what has happened.

The resulting mess and scrambling by governments and banks is a desperate attempt to stop the holes in financial dams everywhere.  Meanwhile, the general public has lost trillions, even those who played by the rules perfectly, and paid their bills, put money down, held a job, and did what their financial planners told them to do.

What a mess.  It will leave the U.S. economy broken for a long time, and the solutions just leave the U.S. government in even more debt.