Word: bigs
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...eyed young man with a pert nose and a soft wave of brown hair, and so you get your parents to take you to his latest movie, Me and Some Dead Guy Who Was Famous Once and the boy is even cuter than usual, but there's also this big guy, with crazy eyes and much less docile hair, who talks about Shakespeare (kill me now), insults everybody - the cute boy worst of all - and chews cigars and sometimes when he talks you see actual spit coming out of his mouth? And on the way home your parents start talking...
...voice those apprehensions?
No, I worked through it. That was my first big job, and I needed to stay in line and not make any waves. I just trusted what they were doing.
...therein lies the problem. For years the UAW and the Big Three - now dwindled to the Detroit Three - operated an unholy alliance. Management would pile on wage hikes and perks, and in return (wink, wink) the union would keep the peace, i.e., rule out strikes, even though both sides must have realized that the amount being paid to workers was unsustainable, particularly if the industry hit any downdrafts - which happened with increasing frequency starting with the 1973 OPEC oil embargo. (See the 50 worst cars of all time...
Just as embarrassing was the colossal ineptitude of the big car companies: Ugly, low-quality cars with shameful gas mileage. Layers of redundant management that relied on amateurish financial controls. Insular thinking reinforced by decades of outsize market share. It was as if Detroit had drawn a road map for Toyota and Honda. And the Japanese drove right in, decimating the U.S. companies. In 1979, GM's U.S. employment peaked at 618,365. Today it's at 75,000 and falling fast. GM's U.S. market share, once about 50%, has fallen to about 20%. True, the quality and efficiency...
...Wall Street? By facing the music now. Toughen up borrowing requirements by banks. Increase oversight, especially when it comes to regulating derivatives. Perhaps enact a 21st century version of Glass-Steagall. And don't allow any institution to become too big to fail. Does that mean some countries may get ahead of us in terms of financial innovation? Sure, but so what? For much of this decade, both England and Iceland were considered friendlier to capital markets than the U.S. England is now threadbare; Iceland is bankrupt...