GLG News by Mr. Jack Lifton, Co-founder and Director
GLG News is now G+ Insights
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Is Nano- going to be just the next buzzword or buzz prefix for Wall Street type promoters?
January 7, 2008
Nano Flakes May Revolutionize Solar Cells | www.sciencedaily.com
The tech 'revolutions' in the period since World War II have been numerous and monumental. Just the advances in electronics and structural materials and the resultant engineering advances made possible by them have changed our civilization globally and forever. Now we are moving from the study and use of the gross properties of materials to the study and use of the microscopic, nano-, properties of metals and materials, which were unknown in quantities of more than a few pounds even in 1945. There is no way to predict the outcome of this new direction for technology or how long it may take to bear fruit.
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January 7, 2008
Waste management: An old "green" investment is newly hot | www.iht.com
The US is not currently realizing any economic value from its large untapped reserves of oil, oil shale, iron, tungsten, copper, chromium, nickel, thorium, rare earths and many other metals and minerals, deposits of which are already proven and feasible to extract technologically? In light of this situation why doesn't the US conserve what it has by effectively mandating that its scrap metals and minerals be recycled here by simply placing a tax on their export equal to the difference between the adjusted value of the scrap, when its actual contents and cost of recovering them are taken into account, and its selling price?
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January 7, 2008
GM Researching Driverless Cars | www.newsweek.com
General Motors seems not to have learned its lesson from Roger Smith's foolish drains on time and capital with EDS and Hughes Electronics. GM, and to be fair, most of the West's OEM automotive industry, seems to still think that you can buy core competency rather than go through the process of mastering it.
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January 7, 2008
Ford sees rollout of next-generation hybrid battery | www.washingtonpost.com
The Ford Motor Company may well be the least qualified OEM automotive producer on earth to comment on the timing of the arrival of the next generation batteries for hybrid vehicles. Nonetheless that fact will get lost in the mountain of bull**** now being built from predictions by OEM automotive managers of R&D about the timing for lithium technology batteries and their use in hybrids and plug-in-hybrids.
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January 4, 2008
With Detroit Downbeat on 2008, Its Suppliers Are Singing the Blues | www.nytimes.com
The global steel industry, outside of the US, is rapidly vertically integrating. Anglo-Indian ArcelorMittal and Russian Severstal, for example, are buying metallurgical (coking) coal mines and iron ore mines wherever and whenever they can, so as to avoid the bind that the Chinese steel industry is now in of being held hostage to a global iron ore cartel. Where are American steel makers in all of this? How does this situation impact the OEM American automotive industry and its supply base?
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Lithium Battery Technolgy for OEM Automotive in 2008
January 2, 2008
Lithium revolution still years away? | www.hybridcarblog.com
There is a saying that bull**** talks and money walks; which category does lithium battery technology for OEM cars and trucks belong in? Will lithium technology batteries be high priced alternatives, reasonably priced replacements, or a technology that failed to meet its promise?
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Has the Titanic of GM Just Hit The Iceberg of Inflation?
December 20, 2007
GM announces price hike to partially recover rising costs | news.xinhuanet.com
Will the Fed ultimately have to increase the money supply in order to pay in dollars for the commodities, once produced in the US sufficiently for domestic demand, that are now more and more being bought from other nations? What will happen when the US is no longer the largest purchaser of these commodities and the producers terminate the dollar pricing linkage? How will the price of a commodity be reflected in the price of a car when the producer of the car must first but a foreign currency with his dollars and then, and only then, buy the commodity with that currency?
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December 20, 2007
E.P.A. Denies California Emission’s Waiver | www.nytimes.com
If California mandates emission's levels so strict that the only way to meet them with an internal combustion engine is to use one that is very small, low power, and clean burning then there is no way by 2016, the projected date at which such restrictions become mandatory, to pull this off other than to severely restrict the number of cylinders and the weight of such vehicles to minimums. There is not enough time nor are there enough natural resources of the right type available to create a fleet of 25,000,000 hybrid, battery, or fuel cell powered vehicles for the California market alone.
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December 17, 2007
FT REPORT - FT WEALTH QUARTERLY 2007: Dow to inject plastics business into $11bn Kuwaiti joint venture | search.ft.com
The Dow Chemical Company has always believed in vertical integration. One of its early business successes was the vertical integration of the magnesium metal business from the extraction and refining of magnesium rich salt brine from company owned wells in Michigan to the production of the metal. Its huge Midland, Texas, complex has long taken locally produced oil and manufactured a broad range of chemicals both for customers and for Dow's other businesses. Dow has been in the raw material extraction business for a long time, and it brings this skill set to the deal with the Kuwaitis.
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Nonsense About An Inefficient And Uneconomical Use For Gold
December 11, 2007
Gold looks to a diesel-powered future | www.ft.com
The World Gold Council, WGC, now says that gold's industrial use is an important consideration for investors. Is this just plain nonsense? Yes.
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December 11, 2007
GM bids for 'significant' stake in Russian Avtovaz | www.autonews.com
General Motors first sold cars in east Europe and China, which were built in and exported from the US; then it made CKDs (Knocked-down kits) for re-assembly in those markets in less than fully equipped assembly plants or in the assembly plants of local manufacturers; and finally it built its own freestanding assembly plants, frequently with a local partner, and, simultaneously, began to create a supplier base for local manufacturing. This is also the strategy of Renault-Nissan under Carlos Ghosn and his predecessor, Louis Schweitzer.
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December 11, 2007
Tesla ousts co-founder Eberhard: PRICEY ROADSTER'S DELIVERY DELAYS LEAD TO HIS EXIT | origin.mercurynews.com
Is this a typical phase in the venture capitalist method of taking over a company, where, after a seemingly overgenerous initial investment that leaves the founders in charge a second round of financing gives the investors the leverage to oust the founder and replace him with professional management? Or, is this just a signal to the marketplace that Mr. Eberhard's statements to the effect that there is nothing special, or known only to Detroit, about building a car is, and was, foolish?
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December 10, 2007
Commodities: The Metal Kingdon | www.newsweek.com
China has been "borrowing industrial manufacturing technology" from American companies for as long as those companies have been killing their supply base by insisting that suppliers meet, match, and/or exceed the China price; i.e., the price for which the customer can ostensibly get the 'same; part or process in China. Of course in order for Chinese companies to bid 'correctly' the customer has given to them, or the supplier has been forced to give them, the blueprints and technology required to level the bidding playing field. This abject stupidity has now ended dramatically as the Chinese have judges their technology level to be high enough now to cut off foreign ownership of the mines and processing plants for metals and minerals, which were modernized for free by the short sighted greedy foreigners. To complete the rout of foreign businessmen China has raised export taxes to where even if a company can get a raw material it can only make its product profitably in China.
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December 10, 2007
Trucks Power China's Economy, At A Suffocating Cost | www.nytimes.com
It is not only poor fuel quality and worn out, poorly engineered in the first place, diesel truck engines that are causing the massive photochemical smogs in Chinese cities due to their, the trucks,' huge emissions of acid-rain forming, photochemical smog producing, nitrogen and sulfur oxides, and particulate carbon and sulfur. It is also the fact that to solve the problem is probably not realistic. All that might be done is to limit its growth and let the major emitters be worn out and get replaced. Solving the problem by retrofitting would dramatically increase the cost of emission controls for diesel trucks around the world, most of all in China.
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December 6, 2007
ACCELERATING GROWTH: In China, Chery Automobile Drives An Industry Shift | online.wsj.com
The transfer of manufacturing technology from the most industrialized western countries to Asia has been going on for more than a century. Will the OEM automotive industry get value or creative destruction from its decision to pay for Chinese low cost labor with manufacturing technology that will ultimately make Chinese labor the most well paid in history?
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December 5, 2007
GM bids for 'significant' stake in Russian Avtovaz | www.autonews.com
The short sighted stock market does not understand GM's global plan. General Motors is North America's highest volume domestic vehicle producer and seller. General Motors is the highest volume non-European manufacturer and seller of vehicles in Western Europe. General Motors is the largest volume non-Chinese producer and seller of vehicles in China. General Motors is now seeking to be the highest volume non-Russian producer and seller of vehicles in the Russian domestic market. General Motors is on a roll.
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December 5, 2007
Baosteel set to gatecrash BHP's bid for Rio Tinto | business.timesonline.co.uk
The Chinese steel industry produces today about one-third of the world's steel each year, and it is growing. China has essentially no domestic iron ore resources or reserves. Chinese steel is today produced mainly from iron ore in basic oxygen (blast) furnaces. China today must pay for imported iron ore and coke for steel making in doillars or euros.
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December 3, 2007
PURCHASING: Value of auto parts buys in China to rise 25% annually | www.freep.com
General Motors made a bad bet by putting all of its (out)sourcing into a China price basket; it left itself thereby completely at the mercy of global market forces over which it has no control whatsoever and which its increasingly isolated purchasing managers seem not to comprehend.
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December 3, 2007
Toyota's Green Problem | www.newsweek.com
The obsolescent Toyota Prius is probably now and most likely has always been a money losing car to build, sell, and maintain, which even at just 3% of Toyota's yearly build may now be having a negative impact on Toyota's image all out of proportion to its sales volume. This is a sharp contrast with its original impact, which due to the irrational exuberance of the Sierra Club was even then all out of proportion to any imaginable impact the cobbled together 'hybrid' could possibly have been imagined to have on the market for small cars let alone on global warming. The one million nickel metal hydride batteries which so far have been installed in all of the Prius's built have increased in cost, since the first one was installed, by a factor of perhaps ten times! Also there seems to be little hope of a lithium-ion battery to revive the Prius as a performance oriented car anytime soon at least if cost is to be a factor. Isn't Kyoto in Japan?
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November 26, 2007
Can Japan's Steel Industry Kick the Coke Habit? | www.businessweek.com
It has always been cheaper to use coke, 'carbonized coal,' to reduce iron oxide (ore) to iron in a blast furnace than to use any other reducing agent, such as hydrogen. Coke has long been the only practical reducing agent, and has been in use, since the beginning of the blast-furnace era in Wyandotte, Michigan, just after the American Civil War. If global warming is caused in part by anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide, as is widely believed, and if global warming is an imminent catastrophe, as is widely believed, then no cost is too great to eliminate the need for burning carbon fuels and reducing agents. Even if hydrogen can replace coke and have other uses simultaneously, which are not today economical by themselves, it would still take the resources and authority of a wealthy nation state to create a hydrogen production and distribution infrastructure. Is Japan on the way to doing just that?
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