Word: clunker
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...other hand, the clunker program was overly complicated, a nightmare to manage for dealers and difficult to understand for consumers. I would give the pure sales impact of the program an A and the administration of the program a D. (Watch TIME's video: "The Secrets to Cash for Clunkers' Success...
More importantly, the program was a lifeline thrown at severely cash-strapped dealers. Sales were up. So were the profits. Consumers tend to drop their guards when there are big incentives, assuming that they will get great deals no matter what. As the clunker sales reached a fevered pitch, I think it's fair to say that the deals got much stingier. Many shoppers could have gotten better deals if they had done their homework before going to the dealership. (Watch a video about an optimistic Dodge dealer...
Some economists worry that the clunker program borrowed sales from future months, so we'll soon be hit with an ugly payback. I think that the payback-factor predictions for this program have been greatly exaggerated. I would argue that hundreds of thousands of potential new car buyers actually postponed buying a car within the last year due to economic uncertainty, and some of them ended up buying within the last few weeks due to the CFC program. That is, it motivated people to buy who had not been planning to do so, which means there shouldn...
That left room in the top 10 for just one rowdy-guy movie aside from G.I. Joe, and it was a clunker. The used-car farce The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard fell hard, cadging just $5.5 million and instantly qualifying for an federal auto bailout. Of the other new releases, Hayao Miyazaki's Ponyo, which had made $165 million in its native Japan, earned $3.5 million in the English-language version - which is not much, but is also not bad, considering the modest returns for Miyazaki's previous theatrical releases in North America (Princess Mononoke, $2.4 million; Spirited Away...
...known, such as the cars recently discovered at the Hamburg port, have sparked political furor - not surprising in an election year. Finance Minister Peer Steinbrueck demanded an investigation into suspected abuse, while the opposition Free Democrats called for establishing a special police unit to crack down on any clunker-related fraud...