LOOKOUT EVERYBODY... FORD Motor Company has huge press release... ROLL OUT THE RED CARPET!
Ford will be hiring an incredible 220 employees over the next
TWO years for a electric car battery plant.
Not bad... $6 BILLION in Taxpayer loans to FORD to create: 9.2 jobs per month.
http://money.cnn.com/2010/05/24/news/companies/ford_green_jobs/index.htm?section=money_topstories&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+rss%2Fmoney_topstories+%28Top+Stories%29
Ford to hire 220 to make hybrid parts
By Blake Ellis, staff reporterMay 24, 2010: 2:09 PM ET
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Ford Motor Co. said Monday it plans to invest $135 million and hire 220 workers to create parts for its new hybrid and electric vehicles.
Ford (
F,
Fortune 500) will add a total of 170 jobs at its Rawsonville and Van Dyke Transmission plants in Michigan, as well as more than 50 electric vehicle engineer positions.
NYSE: DOWN -126.82
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SPAIN BANK needs BAILOUT!
http://uk.reuters.com/article/idUKTRE64N2UQ20100524
[h1]More Spain bank bailouts loom, but news not all bad[/h1]
Judy MacInnes - Analysis
MADRID
Mon May 24, 2010 6:09pm BST
SAN.MC
€8.51
-0.10-1.15%
15:35:30 BST
Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria, S.A.
BBVA.MC
€8.55
-0.18-2.03%
15:35:33 BST
A Spanish flag flutters near the dome of the Bank of Spain in central Madrid February 15, 2010.
Credit: Reuters/Sergio Perez
MADRID (Reuters) - The weekend bailout of a small Spanish savings bank could be the first of several rescues before a mid-year deadline for struggling lenders, but the news does not imply new risks for Spain's financial system.
Business
In a grim reminder of the problems dogging the largely unlisted savings banks, which are most exposed to Spain's property sector slump, the Bank of Spain said early on Saturday it had taken control of CajaSur after its planned merger with peer Unicaja failed.
The Bank of Spain will tap the government's Fund For Orderly Restructuring (FROB) to bolster
CajaSur's balance sheet with an initial 550 million euros (473 million pounds), but the bailout could reach 2 billion euros, according to press reports on Monday.
The Bank of Spain's move is a salutory warning to other savings banks that they also risk being taken over if they drag their heels over mergers ahead of the FROB expiry date of June 30, said Santiago Carbo Valverde, Economic Analysis Professor at Granada University.
But the rescue arrived at a bad time for the Spanish government, which last week announced a 15 billion euros ($18.55 billion) austerity package to repair public finances and jitters spread over Greece. Investors fear that bank balance sheets in some euro zone countries could deteriorate to such an extent that the government will struggle to bail them out.
"We believe the intervention is quite negative news for the financial system, for the sovereign risk profile and for the economy in general," Credit Suisse analyst Santiago Lopez said in a note to clients.
Losses at the savings banks -- known as cajas -- could cost the state, via the FROB, 43 billion euros, Morgan Stanley analysts estimated last month.
The news weighed on Spain's listed bank shares on Monday as concerns re-emerged over the health of the country's leading financial institutions still reeling from S&P's sovereign ratings downgrade last month.
At 1220 GMT (1:20 p.m. BST), shares in Spain's biggest Santander (
SAN.MC) fell 2.63 percent to 8.37 euros, while BBVA (
BBVA.MC) fell 2.91 percent to 8.47 euros.
But analysts said the stability of Spain's financial system was not at risk.
"Foreign investors could be reading the CajaSur intervention as a signal that further bank bailouts could be on the cards and are extrapolating the savings banks' situation to the rest of the system ... But there is no foundation for this," Renta 4 bank analyst Nuria Alvarez said.
The problems of the cajas are well known, and the Bank of Spain says it wants to more than halve the number of ailing small lenders to about 20.
The FROB was created after the Bank of Spain took over Caja Castilla La Mancha last March and has up to 99 billion euros at its disposal to facilitate mergers between the small lenders.
BAILOUTS TO OVERIDE POLITICS
But disagreements over cross regional tie-ups and local politics have ensnarled the consolidation process, however, in a similar way to that facing Germany's Landesbank.
Spanish banks have largely weathered the global financial crisis thanks to strict regulatory oversight, but the bursting of a decade-long housing bubble has left them with an over 300 billion euros ($408.4 billion) debt hangover.
The country's savings banks -- which hold half the assets of Spain's financial system -- are seeing profits eroded by soaring bad loans as real estate developers go the wall.
But unlike listed banks, their ownership model makes it difficult to for them to shore up their balance sheets as they are controlled by local politicians and can only issue non-voting shares with lots of strings attached.
