Word: ultras
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...When Tata first suggested an ultra-cheap car a few years ago, other manufacturers initially scoffed, saying the project was a pipe dream. But if Tata lures away even 10% of the 6.5 million Indians who buy motorbikes every year, not only will it have a hit on its hands, it will have expanded India's car market by more than half. Competitors aren't willing to cede that kind of market share without a fight. Carlos Ghosn, head of Renault-Nissan, recently announced that his company was looking at building a $3,000 car in India. Fiat, General Motors...
...Building ultra-cheap cars is possible largely because of low manufacturing costs in developing countries. Tata and other Indian automakers estimate that their engineering costs alone are about half what they would be in Europe or the U.S. At the same time Tata has tapped the skills of Italy's Fiat, with which it has a joint venture in India, and engine designers in Britain's West Midlands region, some of whom were jobless after closures in Britain's auto industry over the past few years. Indian producers are relentless cost-cutters. Many, including Tata, now buy parts through Internet...
...materialistic individualism so prevalent in Israeli society. Nowadays, dynamic Israeli youngsters want to cash in on the country's high-tech boom and not spend their lives in uniform. The pool of potential recruits is also shrinking for other reasons: 11% of the nation's men are ultra-orthodox and excused from military service, 4% of draft-age Israelis have moved abroad, 5% are rejected for physical reasons and an estimated 5% dodge military service, according to Stuart Cohen, a political scientist at Bar-Ilan University. In addition, about 18% of Israeli men drop out before finishing their three-year...
...Besides diagrams of the latest in Iranian and Russian anti-tank rocketry, and an ultra-violent Hizballah special forces video game, the most impressive display is a plaque listing every single Israeli warplane that bombed Lebanon during the war along with their squadron ID and home bases. Not only did Hizballah survive the bombardment, but its observers still had the presence of mind to keep score. Not bad for 3,000 regular fighters up against a regional superpower...
...might turn into deflation. So it cut short-term rates even further, reducing them to 1% in 2003, while the yield on the 10-year Treasury bond--a key benchmark of long-term rates--dropped as low as 3.13%. The result: a real estate boom, as ultra-low mortgage rates made houses affordable at ever higher prices. Cash from refinancings and home-equity loans also kept consumer spending strong. By mid-2004, confident that deflation was out of the picture, the Fed began raising rates again. But the longer-term interest rates, the ones controlled by investors, stayed stubbornly...