Good news and old news in the business section of the Times.
Apparently the new Fox Business Channel, it of the all good economic news, all the time (while there’s a Republican in the White House) mindset, has so few daily viewers that Nielsen cannot reliably report it. Leaked figures indicate that a little more than 6,000 people watch the channel on any given weekday. To put that number in perspective, it is only about 15 times more than the number of distinct hits I get on this backwater blog. My own personal theory for this cheerful news: people interested in business news are interested in hard facts: they’re not interested in being bullshitted or propagandized. They probably appreciate Fox News for doing that number on the masses, but count them out.
The old news is that the Detroit carmakers are once again hitting hard times because, gasp!!, people aren’t buying gas guzzling trucks anymore. Since the great gas shortage of the early 70s, Detroit has gotten hit on a periodic basis whenever gas prices take a sustained hit. After each beating, it goes back to the old game plan with a vengeance. If I had to bet, I’d say each time they have put even more chips down on the gas guzzlers, when of course they had to know that the days of (relatively) cheap gas were certainly numbered. How does it go: “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me”. What do you call someone that’s fooled five or six times?
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