Never before the Detroit Big 3 car makers have faced such a big challenge. Their financial condition worsened a lot during this year because of both the malfunction of credit market and the sharp drop in automobile sales. Without government bailout, they are likely to go bankrupt soon and cost millions of jobs in the automotive industry. Even if only one of them collapse, it will drag down countless of suppliers and eventually the other two. To persuade the congress to provide financial bailout, the Big 3 have submitted their rescue plans to Washington DC yesterday. Here below is a summary what they will do:

GM

GM will need US$18 billion loan from the government in order to prevent from bankruptcy. In particular, some $4 billion must be available within this month, showing how alarming its cash reserve level is.

To persuade the congress to accept its request, GM promises the following cost cutting measures:

• Reduce workforce from 95,000 to 65,000-75,000 people
• Reduce dealerships from 6,450 to 4,700
• Sell Saab division
• Sell Hummer division
• Sell or eliminate Saturn division
• Downsize Pontiac to a niche brand
• Negotiate with UAW to cut labor  benefits
• CEO Rick Wagoner will receive $1 salary - yes, one US dollar.

Ford

The financial condition of Ford is healthier than both GM and Chrysler. It predicts it will have enough cash to survive until the end of next year. While it is seeking a government loan of US$9 billion, it hopes the loan will not be actually used. Ford forecasts its balance sheet will return to black in year 2011 through the following cost cutting measures:

• Close 6 plants in the next 3 years
• Sell Volvo division
• Negotiate with UAW to cut labor costs
• CEO Alan Mulally will receive $1 salary – yes, the same as his GM counterpart.
• Sell the company’s 5 corporate aircrafts

Chrysler

Similar to GM, the Cerberus-owned Chrysler needs money within this month to be safe from bankruptcy. The exact figure is US$7 billion. Besides, it also wants another US$6 billion from the government funding for green vehicles. For cost cut, Chrysler did not give details, only mentioning it will rationalise production, forge partnership with other car makers to share platforms and pay its CEO Bob Nardelli a salary of $1 – yes, the same as Rick Wagoner and Alan Mulally.

If your company look for a cheap yet hardworking CEO, you can look no further than Detroit. Yes, they do sometimes take corporate aircrafts to meetings and vacation, but these smart guys can get you billions of free government money.

US sales slide in November

The US auto market is experiencing the most severe sales decline in recent decades. In November, the total sales for all makers dropped 11 percent compare with October, or 37% compare with a year ago. In particular, GM dropped 41%, Chrysler 47% and Ford 31%. Even the Japanese could not escape from sharp decline – Toyota slid 34%, Honda 32% and Nissan 42%. Hyundai group suffered a 39% drop. Porsche lost 48% of sales, reflecting luxury sports cars are hit heavily by economy. Among the big car makers, only Volkswagen group (including Audi) dropped by less than 30 percent, which was 21%.

GM: -41%
Ford: -31%
Chrysler: -47%
Toyota: -34%
Honda: -32%
Nissan: -42%
Mazda: -31%
Mitsubishi: -35%
Subaru: -8%
Suzuki: -46%
Hyundai group: -39%
VW group: -21%
BMW group: -27%
Mercedes: -38%
Porsche: -48%

Prechter’s FREE 10-Page Market Letter: Be One of the Few the Government Hasn’t Fooled

Elliott Wave International (EWI), the world’s largest market forecasting firm, has re-released Bob Prechter’s 10-page market letter, FREE!

Downloaded thousands of times in its original launch, EWI has put it back online for a limited time!

Wall Street Legend and best-selling author Bob Prechter reveals 28 answers to questions you may not know to ask and the government definitely doesn’t want you to know.

You’ll read blunt commentary and sharp analysis that reveals the truth about what’s really going on in the U.S. financial markets, in Congress, and at your very own bank.
As the U.S. government pulls a sleight-of-hand trick on the unsuspecting public, you can break the cycle of misinformation by reading this 10-page report.

Click Here to Get Your Free Report

Warning: Prechter’s answers to these questions may shock you.

• What impact did the so-called “stimulus package” have on the U.S. economy?
• In an economic depression, will pension funds keep most retired Americans afloat?
• Who really benefits when the government props up Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and what’s the fraud behind the idea of “too important” to fail?
• Who does the government consider to be homeowners: you and your neighbors, or the banks that hold the deeds?
• Who really endorsed the emergency Housing Act – and who will be hurt by it?
• Can the Fed keep making loans to banks forever?
• Is it actually against the law in some states to warn people of potentially dangerous banks?
• And many more!

Don’t wait! Get this free report that readers are calling “a wake up call to lots of Americans.”
Click Here to Get Your Free Report

About the Publisher, Elliott Wave International

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Founded in 1979 by Robert R. Prechter Jr., Elliott Wave International (EWI) is the world’s largest market forecasting firm. Its staff of full-time analysts provides 24-hour-a-day market analysis to institutional and private investors around the world.

With the amazing growth of the Forex market, you are going to see an astounding amount of traders lose all their money. Unfortunately, they haven’t followed the simple steps I have laid out for you. Go through these steps and give yourself the greatest opportunity to achieve your goals.

1. Have Faith In Yourself

To reach the level of elite Forex trader, you must trust in yourself and your Forex trading education. You must be willing to make all your trading decisions, instead of relying on someone else’s thoughts or ability (or lack of). Of course, you will prepare yourself fully before every risking any money.

2. Accept Your Learning Curve

Unless you are a veteran trader, you will lose money trading the Forex market. This is a near certainty. I don’t say this to talk you out of trading. In fact, quite the opposite. You will be trading against others that fall to this reality day in and day out. You, however, will not risk a dime until you have learned the skills you need to make money trading the Forex.

3. Decide What Type of Trader You Are

There are many ways to trade the Forex. They range from very active to very patient. You must decide which style suits you best. The best time to learn this about yourself is while you are trading a demo account. There is no need to allow your learning curve to cost you money.

4. Get Educated

Education is the shortest path to elite Forex trading. Regardless of your ultimate goals, you will reach them quicker with a great Forex trading education. Take some time to review different options before deciding on who to trust with your Forex trading education needs. A Forex seminar will help shorten your learning curve drastically.

5. Continue to Get Educated

In order to achieve and retain elite Forex trading skills, you must constantly be adding to you knowledge base. Your education should never end. In fact, one of the key points to look for in an elite Forex trading course is ongoing education. It’s nice to have an ongoing relationship with the person/people helping you to achieve your goals.

What separates an elite Forex trader from all others is their desire and ability to be independent. Many traders are willing to follow signals, systems, strategies, or anything else you may call them. By taking this approach, however, these traders are only as good as the people they follow.

An elite Forex trader will lead. Their decisions will be calculated and analyzed to near perfection. They will make decisions with no hesitation, and handle the growth of their account in a predetermined, intelligent fashion. Take your trading to their level and you will never look back.

Editor’s Note: On Nov. 19, 2008, the U.S. Labor Department reported a 1 percent drop in the consumer price index for October 2008. The drop marked the largest decline in 61 years, and it was the first decline in that measure in nearly a quarter of a century. The 1 percent drop was twice as large as many mainstream analysts had forecast. Such a large decline in consumer prices is forcing U.S. policymakers to rethink the possibility of deflation in America. For more on deflation, we turn to Robert Prechter, the man who literally wrote a book on how to survive it. The following article, adapted from Prechter’s book Conquer the Crash – You Can Survive and Prosper in a Deflationary Depression, will help you understand exactly what to expect from deflation.

In addition to this article, visit Elliott Wave International to download the free 8-page report, Inflation vs. Deflation. It contains details on which threat you should prepare for and steps you can take to protect your money.

By Robert Prechter, CMT

Before explaining the price effects of inflation and deflation, we must define the terms inflation, deflation, money, credit and debt.

Webster’s says, “Inflation is an increase in the volume of money and credit relative to available goods,” and “Deflation is a contraction in the volume of money and credit relative to available goods.”

Money is a socially accepted medium of exchange, value storage and final payment. A specified amount of that medium also serves as a unit of account.

According to its two financial definitions, credit may be summarized as a right to access money. Credit can be held by the owner of the money, in the form of a warehouse receipt for a money deposit, which today is a checking account at a bank. Credit can also be transferred by the owner or by the owner’s custodial institution to a borrower in exchange for a fee or fees – called interest – as specified in a repayment contract called a bond, note, bill or just plain IOU, which is debt. In today’s economy, most credit is lent, so people often use the terms “credit” and “debt” interchangeably, as money lent by one entity is simultaneously money borrowed by another.

When the volume of money and credit rises relative to the volume of goods available, the relative value of each unit of money falls, making prices for goods generally rise. When the volume of money and credit falls relative to the volume of goods available, the relative value of each unit of money rises, making prices of goods generally fall. Though many people find it difficult to do, the proper way to conceive of these changes is that the value of units of money are rising and falling, not the values of goods.

The most common misunderstanding about inflation and deflation – echoed even by some renowned economists – is the idea that inflation is rising prices and deflation is falling prices. General price changes, though, are simply effects of inflation and deflation.

The price effects of inflation can occur in goods, which most people recognize as relating to inflation, or in investment assets, which people do not generally recognize as relating to inflation. The inflation of the 1970s induced dramatic price rises in gold, silver and commodities. The inflation of the 1980s and 1990s induced dramatic price rises in stock certificates and real estate. This difference in effect is due to differences in the social psychology that accompanies inflation and disinflation, respectively.

The price effects of deflation are simpler. They tend to occur across the board, in goods and investment assets simultaneously.

…………….

For more information on deflation and inflation, including money-saving steps for protecting your wealth, download Elliott Wave International’s free 8-page report, Inflation vs. Deflation.

Robert Prechter, Certified Market Technician, is the founder and CEO of Elliott Wave International, author of Wall Street best-sellers Conquer the Crash and Elliott Wave Principle and editor of The Elliott Wave Theorist monthly market letter since 1979.

The stock market is crashing, banks are failing, mortgage companies are failing, the housing meltdown, unemployment is skyrocketing.  If not for the bad news, there’d be no news at all.

And one thing that all these recurring news stories do is cause an enormous amount of stress—stress that is both emotionally and physically devastating.

Well, there is a quick, easy, and best of all drug-free way to eliminate all this stress from your life and enjoy some amazing health benefits at the same time.

It’s one simple thing you can do evary day.
Take a look…

More and more studies at top research facilities around the world are documenting scientific evidence of the health and longevity benefits of meditation.

In fact, it’s become a widely acknowledged fact that daily meditation is not just good for you—but has been proven to actually extend your life.

But if you’re like most of us, you don’t have the time (or patience) to invest years of practice in trying to master the art of meditation.

Well, now, thanks to my friend Bill Harris, you don’t have to.

Bill’s company, Centerpointe Research Institute has created a proprietary audio technology called Holosync® that instantly (and gently) puts you into deep states of meditation (in fact, even deeper than those achieved by veteran Zen Monks), at the push of a button.

This means that you can now start enjoying and profiting from all the recognized health benefits of deep meditation beginning the very first day you use it instead of waiting through years of hard practice.

As you know, our passion here is to make available to people just like you–the best and most effective ways to…

• Dramatically improve your mental, emotional, and spiritual health…
• Help you create real and constant happiness in your life, regardless of your past or present
  circumstances…
• Improve your creativity, intelligence, and mental functioning…
• Significantly improve your overall sense of well being and inner peace…
• Help you create your own success in the world, along with the personal satisfaction and sense of fulfillment that comes with being successful.
• And, as recent research proves, you’ll not only live happier with daily meditation, but you’ll live longer too.

Frankly, it seems to me that this is a pretty good reason to try The Holosync Solution by itself.  But when you add in the fact that they will happily send you a no-charge demo CD so you can see for yourself how great Holosync works, it should make the decision a “no-brainer.” Definitely I will give a try.

German Doctor Cures an HIV Patient With a Bone Marrow Transplant

reporter writes

“HIV is the virus that causes Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). Until now, HIV has no cure and has led to the deaths of over 25 million people. However, a possible cure has appeared. Dr. Gero Hutter, a brilliant physician in Germany, replaced the bone marrow of an HIV patient with the bone marrow of a donor who has natural immunity to HIV. The new bone marrow in the patient then produced immune-system cells that are immune to HIV. Being unable to hijack any immune cell, the HIV has simply disappeared. The patient has been free of HIV for about 2 years. Some physicians at UCLA have developed a similar therapy and plan to commercialize it.”

The details:
A Doctor, a Mutation and a Potential Cure for AIDS

Investing for your retirement is incredibly important, and can help you to realize your dreams of relaxation and enjoyment in retirement.  Although it may seem difficult, saving for retirement is not necessarily difficult.  Starting early, however, is very important when assuring a secure retirement later on.  Saving for retirement demands some sacrifice, but you will enjoy the later years more so if these sacrifices can be made earlier on.  There are several opportunities of investment in saving for retirement.

The traditional mentality when saving for retirement has focused on conservative investing.  This “low risk, income only” model of retirement investing was followed mostly throughout the 1950s, 60s, and 70s.  Recently, however, increasing life spans and inflation have made this conservative technique risky simply because it doesn’t take enough chances.  Investing in bonds and safe stock only tends to result in meager dividends that won’t be enough for a long and healthy retirement.

More modern retirement plans must take some risk in order to provide for the retirement that everyone wants.  Because of inflation, dividends that once may have been adequate now struggle to provide a decent living for retirees.  Riskier investments, often through a mutual fund, are necessary in order to ensure the retirement that you have envisioned.  The true threat anymore these days is that a retiree will run out of money.  With a more diversified and risk taking portfolio, higher growth will allow a retiree to live in comfort.  If this approach is taken early on, the investor can ride out poor markets and still come out with a significant nest egg.

One of the best ways to figure out if your approach is working is to experiment with one of the many online retirement calculators available on the Internet.  Calculators such as CNNMoney.com or Bloomberg.com are capable of calculating retirement funds.  Although these calculators are certainly not foolproof, they can give you a general idea of whether your investments are going to work in the long term.

Speaking with a financial adviser can also help in determining the viability of your saving strategy.  There are several important questions to ask yourself, such as whether you intend on living through income alone, or if you will withdraw from your investment principal.  Budgeting for retirement is extremely important, and you must pace yourself financially in retirement.

Barak Obama has been elected president beating Republican nominee John McCain. Great, maybe I was expecting what happened back in 2004 and 2000 with Florida. This time was just without disturbance and you could feel the emotions and hope of the people in Chicago thru the TV screen wishing for democrats back to the White House; awesome.

Obama is the first African-American to be nominated by a major American political party for president.  As the 44th president, Obama will move into the Oval Office as leader of a country that is almost certainly in. A graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he became the first black person to serve as president of the Harvard Law Review, Obama worked as a community organizer and practiced as a civil rights attorney before serving three terms in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004.

Obama’s challenge: fix economy, save world. “There will be no poor.”

It has been eight years since that fateful Election Night when United States stayed up as long as it could through the dark hours without a president, only to wake up to some of the darkest years in American history.

That’s why the sense of hope that swept Barack Obama into the White House now has been felt around the world, from the celebrations in Kenya to the parties in Europe, Asia, and around America herself.

No president, even with an overwhelming majority in Congress like Obama will have, can ever hope to solve all of this. But progress can be made on all fronts. Indeed, just turning in the right direction on some of them would be a huge success.

On the economy, Obama has a great challenge as voters expect results.

• Obama must solve a financial calamity that requires billions of dollars in spending that the U.S. doesn’t have.
• He must address a nation that feels overtaxed, yet is in desperate need of funds to save companies, jobs and homes.
• He must realign a broken financial regulatory system without adding a crippling new set of regulations.
• He must restore confidence in America’s economy in a world that just got sucker-punched by an exported credit crisis that is causing a global recession.
• He must pick a Treasury Secretary under the greatest global scrutiny a President has ever seen, not to mention cabinet posts for Defense, Environment, and even Trade that will take on strategic importance far beyond their historical legacies.
• Most importantly, he must enact as many of the vital social programs as he can while also cutting the national debt and budget deficit.

No doubt his speech was soaring and inspiring. But once he has made it to the White House, his actions will be measured far more than his words. This historic election will be a milestone in American politics. But Obama’s real place in history will measured by whether he actually has the chops to reform and rebuild an economy — the largest in the world — gone horribly and irrevocably awry.

Hollister clothing is an affordable line of products that provide a stylish look for the younger market across America.  Hollister appeals largely to the younger high school and young adult markets.  The Hollister clothing appeal focuses often around clever slogans and printed shirts.  Elaborate designs and sometimes provocative shirts are commonly found at any Hollister clothing outlet across the United States, in any given mall.  Hollister puts a great deal of emphasis on the atmosphere in their stores as well, developing each into a full fledged production design environment.

Hollister clothing retail environments are typically elaborate setups involving narrow spaces, loud music, and complex lighting.  This entire environment has the object of achieving a chic atmosphere for the buyer.  When shopping at a Hollister clothing outlet, you can typically find the best deals hidden away toward the back of the store.  Items closer to the front of the store, especially around the windows, tend to be higher priced.

Buying off season is the best way to shop smartly.  A visit to the back of a Hollister clothing outlet will typically reveal a wealth of off season items that have been heavily reduced in price.  Although some of these items are placed in the back of the store simply because they won’t sell, others are there just because they are out of season at the moment.  The most expensive items are going to be pieces that are rolling out for the current season.

Shopping continually out of season is a great way to save considerable amounts of money.  When the appropriate season rolls around, you will have all the clothes you need, and further opportunities to buy for the next season.  Doing this and avoiding the front rows of a Hollister clothing outlet are the best way to save considerable amounts of money on clothes.

A Hollister clothing outlet is usually less expensive than retailers such as Gap or Express.  On the other hand, Hollister clothing is certainly more expensive than outlets like Old Navy or any standard department chain store.  The trade off is worth it for many consumers, as Hollister offers a distinctive flavor of style with their items.  Again, shopping off season and looking thoroughly through the store are both great ways to reduce the price of the best Hollister clothing fashions.

Patrick Gavin of Text Link Ads sent in a newsletter promoting a new batch of TLA Affiliate Banners. The sample shows the $100 Free Promotion ad. Save in your machine, here the linking instructions:

http://www.text-link-ads.com/starter_kit.php?ref=21887 (replace 21887 by your TLA referer ID)

According to him, these set of banners are high performing and have been converting very well. Will give this one a try and see how it goes.