PSA Peugeot Citroen said that if made a great sum of money in the first half, and Daimler AG, Honda Motor Co. and Nissan Motor Co. notified quarterly results that are better than expected. Moreover, Peugeot said it had 467 million euros in free cash, after reducing all of the unsold stocks. Professional analysts were proved to be wrong when they predicted a 40 billion yen loss for Honda, while the company actually reported a net income of 7.5 billion yen. On the other hand, Daimler still reported a deficit. However, it was much narrower than the estimated results. Nissan was predicted a 58.5 billion yen loss, yet it turned out to be a 16.5 billion deficit. According to Edwin Meyer, “It will be a very bad year, but it’s getting better … The general consensus is that things will start to look a lot better from October”. All over the media, signs of the ease in the recession have been alerted. The Newsweek magazine posted on its cover that the recession is over. People all over the world are starting to have optimism, yet lots are still skeptical. Even if the recession is over, there is still a lot of debt to pay off, and don’t even think the average American will start spending money right away; it will take years for consumer spending to rise once again. The real question is, could this be the end to the recession, or just a temporary state of balance?

We have been hearing of all the changes that are to come from President Obama. First, it was the cap-and-trade bill, now it’s the health-care reform, and coming soon is the public education reform; all during the course of six months! To make such changes to a country as big as the United States, a lot of time is needed, time that used wisely would accomplish all these objectives. Therefore, the time we are talking about is to be measured in years, not months. However, what our current President does not seem to understand, is that time is to be given to these situations, and if rushed through, several and fatal mistakes could be made. He passed the cap-and-trade bill by only seven votes. Now struggling to get the votes in for the health-care reform, President Obama has lost much of his credibility, and is now blaming former President Bush for all the debt our nation has to face. The next question is, what are we to see for the education reform? How are we going to improve the standards by changing the dates breaks are to take place? Shouldn’t President Obama invest in new methods of teaching, new school material to raise the standards instead of just swapping the breaks around? Shouldn’t he just take a little bit more time at the desk and think through this plans to make them work? Shouldn’t he just slow down?

During May, a new type of flu was reported to be deadly in Mexico. Now all over the Americas, extending from Argentina to Canada, the swine flu has taken thousands of lives and infected thousands of people as well. What looked like a rather small flu ended as a devastating pandemic. Now, if anyone gets to see a global map of where the swine flu is, a strong, yet strange sense comes in: the swine flu is mostly in the Americas, and not much of it is in the Middle East. In fact, one of the only countries where there have been swine flu cases in the Middle East is Israel. Is this just a strange coincidence, or a new type of terrorism? Let’s analyze both sides. Coincidences happen all the time; just think of the millions there are: our existence, our survival through the ages and millions more. If the swine flu is really a natural flu, then we should assume it can only live in regions where the climate is similar to the Americas’. The true problem is that the Americas’ climate can range from negative ten degrees to one hundred degrees. Isn’t that a little bit strange? Moving on, let’s analyze the other side of the story. Since terrorists have no way of reaching America, could they have hired scientists to create the next world pandemic, in the attempt to destroy the United States? The question might sound very scary, yet it has its own logic. If security in airports has doubled since 9/11/2001, there would be almost no way of a terrorist to infiltrate into the country. Bombing attacks in other countries would be useless to them, so there was no other way of getting here. However, a virus can travel by itself, and as it has been seen in the maps, it is now everywhere. So, what is the true reason for all of this; just a coincidence, or a next generation attack?

It was simply stunning to hear President Obama speak in New Jersey. His whole speech on healthcare was nothing than a mere deformation of the real facts that would affect the economy. As he put it, the healthcare plan would provide “lower costs, more choices, and coverage you can count on”. Let’s start analyzing the phrase that was mentioned. First of all, come the “lower costs”, one of the most controversial topics in this healthcare reform. It should be changed to “higher costs”, since the taxes will dramatically increase for the wealthy, who have worked so much to accomplish what they have, and pay for the other millions of Americans who hadn’t had the chance to get there. In the conservative point of view, personal responsibility is not promoted in the least, yet submerged significantly. Secondly, let’s analyze the “more choices” it offers. Once more, the government will control where you can get different treatments, since it will be to expensive for them to let people choose where to go. Lastly, the “coverage you can count on” is simply depressing. Not only taxes are going to be high, and you will be able to choose between a small selection of hospitals near you, the heath care quality will be substandard, since the government will be paying doctors a mere portion of what they used to get. We need to understand, that even if the current healthcare is not very good, that the government-run health care system will be both more expensive and much worse than the current one. 

As it has been announced, the Obama administration plans to change the financial security system completely. What the current administration doesn’t understand is the fact that the market, as well as the people have memories; we can remember certain things. The market will automatically know what not to do, and the people have learned their lesson to not investing money in very risky stocks. New rules, and new terms will create new problems unknown to people. These new problems will have to be resolved, yet new organizations will have to be created to control the new problems. In the end, with this never ending circle, the markets will be fully controlled by the government, just like in a command regime. The following paragraph written by the great economist Adam Smith in his book, The Wealth of Nations describes how the market auto-regulates itself to fit the effectual demand by the people, and how regulations can turn out be very harmful to the economy:

The market price of any particular commodity, though it may continue long above, can seldom continue long below, its natural price. Whatever part of it was paid bellow the natural rate, the persons whose interest it affected would immediately feel the loss, and would immediately withdraw either so much land, or so much labor, or so much stock, from being employed about it, that the quantity brought to market would soon be no more than sufficient to supply the effectual demand. Its market price, therefore, would soon rise to the natural price. This would be at least the case where there was perfect liberty. 

After it very narrowly passed by the legislation, the cap-and-trade policy to invest on green industries was very controversial. It was supposed to help global warming, even if we don’t even know it exists. So, what’s the real meaning of green? In the following, rather short post, we will be discussing the meaning and the possible use of green technology. Is it truly made to fully help the environment? In my opinion, the green technology is meant to, in part, help the environment, yet majorly to make the United States independent from the Middle Eastern nations, from which it buys its oil supply from. This is a very possible answer, considering the major struggle of the United States to get its oil, even in tough times like a recession. The local oil production is not enough to satisfy the needs, as it is shown by all the transactions between the U.S. and OPEC, and other oil exporters. Just imagine, the whole world would change if another source of energy was found to work. The supply and demand scheme would change completely, if a mineral or chemical product found in the U.S. was to work as a source of energy. The U.S. would soon be selling this new energy source all over the world! Then, why is it that the government calls this technology green, making the population think that its main objective is to help the environment, while the real objective is the one discussed in the latter sentences? Why can’t the government be clear on this, and let us know, the citizens, the real things that they are doing with our tax money?

As it was mentioned in his campaign, President Obama is proposing a government-run healthcare plan. For most, this is good news: having a universal healthcare plan paid with taxes. The last phrase represents the common reasoning of most Americans, which believe this is true. However, there are a lot of hidden facts, the ones that the Obama administration doesn’t want to show. First, the healthcare plan will significantly reduce the salary for most doctors, which means the quality of the healthcare will have a significant downturn. Therefore, since the healthcare quality will get worse, and the salary of doctors, nurses, dentists and much more will be reduced, Americans will come back to the private healthcare corporations. This will leave public hospitals desolated and incompetent. In the end, not many people will use public hospitals, even though they will have to pay higher taxes for services they don’t even use.  Luckily, senate Democrats forecasted that President Obama doesn’t have enough votes to pass the healthcare reform. As Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.) put it, “I don’t know that [Obama] has the votes right now. I think there’s a lot of concern in the Democrats caucus”. In conclusion, it’s the taxpayers’ money that is in risk of being wasted into something that might make the economy go even worse.