This year has been absolutely amazing for Union drives:
https://aflcio.org/formaunion/union-organizing-wins
Anyone who is rightfully dissatisfied with the share of value they own compared to capital should be unionizing to seize the means from them
https://aflcio.org/formaunion/union-organizing-wins
Anyone who is rightfully dissatisfied with the share of value they own compared to capital should be unionizing to seize the means from them
It seems Volkswagen stock is down -16.23% last-5-years, and trading at a price-to-book ratio of 0.39.
I'm not an accountant, but with such a low P/B ratio, is there a chance the company gets bought out and liquidated for its assets, costing everyone's jobs?
For comparison: Ford trades at price-to-book ratio of 1.13 and is up 16.62% last-5-years (still not much better than the risk-free rate). And long-term TSLA shareholders, of course, have made incredible profits.
So it's like Bitcoin. It's worth a lot because a lot of people believe it's worth a lot.
They way they did that was to come up with the craziest green agenda ever: no more sales of ICE vehicles in the EU by... 2035. They decided that a few years ago and this was the beginning of the end for all the EU car manufacturers.
There's no way the EU car manufacturers can be competitive with Tesla on one hand (better batteries) or the chinese (way, way, way cheaper vehicles) by 2035.
So EU politicians, in their usual idiocy, decided to destroy the economy of the biggest country in the EU, Germany.
Seeing this as an EU citizen makes me sick.
I understand that it's great to take ESG postures but... At the cost of destroying your entire economy? All the while the EU is a measly 400 million people and there are billions of people in, say, China and India who don't give a fuck about destroying the planet.
Insanity. 2035 was way too early: this left no time to german car manufacturers. A sad state of affair.
The woes of VW have little to do with the green agenda (the electric switch is a reality worldwide), and more to do with a brand tarnished by the emission scandal and the whiff of corruption emanated by the (lack of real) consequences in Germany - because the German government largely looked the other way.
Not really. Its partially state owned and considering the influence of the unions and the government nobody could really buy it (especially not to liquidate it).
The valuation is not great, but they are still reasonably profitable also it pays a 5-7% dividend which is quite decent (and I think if its taken into account the return over the last 5 years was positive if still not great).
VW would be better off as a worker owned cooperative and have no stock price
There was a time before the stock market created the mechanism to decouple labor from production
The plan now is to create the inverted stock market - returning capital to its rightful owner
Funny how we never saw the usage of Chinese slave labor as an issue warranting tariffs when it made western companies huge profits and leaving westerners jobless, but only when they have to face with the new Chinese competitors and loose profits do they cry wolf.
Hypocrisy much?
In both cases, it’s just capitalists wanting to make money. It may be awful but it’s at least consistent.
I can go on Alibaba and buy batteries directly from Eve Energy Co for reasonable prices-- batteries that I could stick in my homebuilt electric car, or do exactly whatever I wanted with. I can buy synthetic crystals, quartz, yttria stabilized zirconia monocrystals, sapphire boules, etc.
In the west all these things are locked up. You can't buy them if you're an ordinary person, so no one buys them to experiment on.
A western car manufacturer wouldn't sell batteries to an individual, nor would his supplier. But in China they don't care, if you pay, you get it.
Of course, upon all this, they're also strategic. The government actually analyses things and figures out critical technologies for the future and makes sure that a decent number of people are working seriously on them, that they do this as a job, and with the intent of actually realising large-scale production with real impact.
The Chinese government set out to build EVs in 1994 - GM was already well advanced on their electric vehicle (the EV1, which launched in 1996). However, GM discontinued the EV1[1] in 1999, but the Chinese government stayed the course. No publicly listed American company can stay on-task on a project that will only bear fruit in 30 years; long-term projects are the first to be lose funding when there are macro-economic headwinds; see multiple Google X projects, and Google is/was one of the better companies at attempting long-term projects. Hell, even government agencies like NASA struggle with projects that span more than one presidential administration.
1. Incidentally, the Tesla co-founders were inspired to start Tesla by the EV1 - which is why referencing traditional automotive OEMs as "dinosaurs" is laughable