Ford Bond Rating

[Big Dave]

This past week Ford bond rating was dropped to one notch above junk. Think Trump will offer to bail them out like Obuma did with GM and Chrysler? Should Ford be bailed at at all? How much government involvement in private industry is to much involvement? What say all ya'll?

[>>>>head]

I saw this and was very confused as their truck business is known to be a cash spigot. IMHO, the bond rating agency called this wrong unless they have a crystal ball that suggest a massive increase in fuel prices and/or a mean and long recession

[Gateclyve Photographic]

All it means is FoMoCo's cost to borrow money is a bit higher. No bailout necessary.

None of the big money types are enthused about investment in anything automotive but electric cars these days. Ford CEO "Buddy" Hackett's myopic abandonment of automobiles for trucks in the U.S. market spooks a lot of investors because it means the Glass House Gang has no apparent contingency for another "energy crisis" or recession. Ford's also reportedly in rough shape in China. . Materials costs (read: aluminum, imported auto parts) are also getting higher, squeezing profit margins that the "clean hands" analysts believe are already too thin. .

Buddy's got to go. He's worse than Jac "the Knife" Nassar . . . another out-of-his-depth chump who almost destroyed Ford.

BTW, Li'l Billy Ford ought to be thankful for Brian France because it insulates Mr. Ford from being the most clueless scion calling the shots at a billion dollar family business . . . (but not by much)

[Monster]

How much government involvement in private industry is to much involvement?

This "investment" related thread was started innocently enough I'm sure, but has the potential of going down the disallowed path of politics .. keep it clean people.

[SuperBuickGuy]

BTW, Li'l Billy Ford ought to be thankful for Brian France because it insulates Mr. Ford from being the most clueless scion calling the shots at a billion dollar family business . . . (but not by much)

This "investment" related thread was started innocently enough I'm sure, but has the potential of going down the disallowed path of politics .. keep it clean people.

Here, let me help

both of them - have people who change their toilet paper roll for them and will never wonder when the next payday is..... it's like football, watching one set of millionaires beat up on another set of millionaires. Yet we still watch.... well, I don't watch NASCAR, I actually have things to do that are more important (like changing toilet paper rolls when low).

bond ratings - are nothing more or less then a curve that describes the where that company is in relation to other investments. Automobile producers, in general, are a disfavored investment because they rely on public perception and their embrace of current design trends.

and directly to Ford. Nothing says "we're in trouble" more then putting out lots and lots of low-volume performance cars while the bread-and-butter suffers. Ask yourself, outside of their trucks and mustangs, what home runs do they have? precious few.... that's kind of the problem for them - they're spending money to create buzz but that buzz is giving investors a rash because the last two companies who did exactly the same thing were GM and Chrysler.....

[Gateclyve Photographic]

Explorer and Escape are still hits. Combined sales of over half a million units.

However all is not well. See e.g. this recent Motor Trend magazine report:

[A]ccording to the latest study, if Ford is betting on converting its current sedan owners into crossover buyers, it may be disappointed.

Automotive News reports that Cox Automotive recently published the results of a study of Ford sedan owners. Half of the people surveyed said they plan to replace their car with a new or used sedan from another brand, while only 10 percent say they'll switch to a crossover. Interestingly, five percent said they'll buy a Mustang, and another three percent have their eyes on a Ford truck.

Hackett's plan is a Titanic-sized disaster looming. Many investors are savvy enough to see that.

What I strongly suspect is that Ford will soon reverse it . . . either by entering into some relationship with an Asian sedan maker or by building sedans off of the Mustang platform. It's just a hunch, but I doubt the dealers are happy about how things are going at the moment.

[RockJustRock]

SBG tree'd me but I'd say "The Truck and Mustang Store" is not a hit on Wall Street.

[SuperBuickGuy]

Explorer and Escape are still hits. Combined sales of over half a million units.

However all is not well. See e.g. this recent Motor Trend magazine report:



Hackett's plan is a Titanic-sized disaster looming. Many investors are savvy enough to see that.

What I strongly suspect is that Ford will soon reverse it . . . either by entering into some relationship with an Asian sedan maker or by building sedans off of the Mustang platform. It's just a hunch, but I doubt the dealers are happy about how things are going at the moment.

You think a sedan is going to save the company when everyone else is building millions of units each of their CUVs in a quarter? Noone wants sedans. Not just that but both the Escape and the Explorer are beyond long in the tooth.

DETROIT — Very strong truck sales and a wave of all-new crossovers helped General Motors Co. (NYSE: GM) deliver more than 758,000 vehicles in the United States in the second quarter of 2018.

758,000 in a quarter.... truck sales are 70k a quarter, CUVs - they're adding lines to produce more of them

https://www.gm.com/investors/sales/u...roduction.html

they sold 6.5 million cars in 2017.... Ford is in huge trouble and a 'plan' isn't going to save them from junk status; they need a track record.... that they don't have.

It simply gets worse for them, they have nothing in the segment and right now CUVs (and for the foreseeable future) are 75% of the 16.5 million vehicles built each year.....

and finally, why would Mazda hole their own production when they can't produce enough CX5s as it is? This won't kill Ford, but Ford best beware because they're well on their way to being the next Mopar-sized-hole. Mopar lives because Jeep. Ford has no such animal in their shed - the truck and performance car segment is exceptionally competitive, and all it takes is a bit of a falter to watch it all go up in smoke. As is, all those Mustang memes have caused some damage to the brand, then the aluminum bed (GM went straight to carbon fiber)....

Mary threaded the needle with GM - she managed to revamp the money-makers while not abandoning the performance arena. GM truck lovers have begged for a Raptor-esque or Jeep-esque rig from GM; but it hasn't happened because they don't have the money to do it - Ford still has money but they're wasting it on halo cars and trucks (and yes, that stunning silence from the 4x4 magazines about the ZR2 actually isn't hurting them because Colorado and Canyon owners have been laying on the butt-hurt to TuRD drivers for awhile now)

[pdub]

In my career I made it all the way to corporate. I've been in that rubber room where the big shots meet, the board room. I don't have any idea why I was promoted so far, but when I was in the room, I had no business even being there. I played no role. Not in the car industry of course, but I can imagine all the board rooms are the same.

You have the power players, and they talk in terms of quarters. Look at it this way, the shift supervisor wants everything to run right for 8 hours or 12, however long that shift is, that is the only focus, the only mindset. The superintendent has to plan a budget the operations department for next year sometime around November. Just a prediction, a long shot guess.

The guys in the board room, they have a lot more than that to look at and talk about.

They think in quarters - "So we'll roll that out in the 3rd quarter of next year." Global, corporate. And everybody at the table agrees, if the most important guy at the table says it. Because nobody at the table has the balls to dispute it. That's how decisions are made. It's not a mystery, it's people sitting at a table, with a pecking order. I saw it. That's where "direction" decisions are made. And the folks at corporate are so far removed from the operations aspect of it, they are sure that whatever decisions they make are the best ones.

[SuperBuickGuy]

if a company is making decisions in the boardroom, they're already failing. By the time anything is presented and voted, it's been vetted by countless minions. It's like Court, all Court is a play that draws together everything done before. With that said, the Court opinions are nothing more then a Court trying to convince the world they are right. Board meetings and shareholder meets are exactly the same thing.

you want to know where ideas happen? some guy mopping the floor who thinks of a better widget. CEO hears it, makes it his idea, and gets paid big bucks spending his time being sure no one knew where the idea came from. It's been this way since the beginning of time... don't believe me?

¹⁴ There was once a small city with only a few people in it. And a powerful king came against it, surrounded it and built huge siege works against it. ¹⁵ Now there lived in that city a man poor but wise, and he saved the city by his wisdom. But nobody remembered that poor man.
Ecclesiastes 9:14-16.

[pdub]

SBG, you're saying what I'm saying, and I'm only saying what I saw. And the company went bankrupt for a while. Then came back and then started shutting stuff down to control costs. But it's a dying industry anyhow, I'm only second guessing them to start with.

I cannot agree more, ask the janitor what's really going on. But they didn't. I'm only glad I'm free of it. Some younger guys are not, unfortunately.

[RockJustRock]

Well.... I doubt Ford is listening to janitors much although that COULD be where that Mustang and Truck Store idea came from.

I did the corporate express elevator thing as well. Went from being a Temp worker counting inventory in Wisconsin to branch manager in Los Angeles. The Bachelor and Masters degree guys decided I was the guy they could BS so I jumped ship to a competitor and told them where to stick their 90 day NDA. Then the possibly stress induced Auto Immune Disorder set in and the rest is history...

[pdub]

Well.... I doubt Ford is listening to janitors much although that COULD be where that Mustang and Truck Store idea came from.

I did the corporate express elevator thing as well. Went from being a Temp worker counting inventory in Wisconsin to branch manager in Los Angeles. The Bachelor and Masters degree guys decided I was the guy they could BS so I jumped ship to a competitor and told them where to stick their 90 day NDA. Then the possibly stress induced Auto Immune Disorder set in and the rest is history...

I called into a board room meeting, I was on assignment at one of the mills in the southeast. My boss was the Training Director for Corporate. He was stationed at the corporate. The issue at hand was a training package that I had been working on for months in tandem with a contractor. A PowerPoint presentation about Internet Security. Everybody was going to have to go through it. I mean EVERYBODY.

So I got connected to the speakerphone on the table in the board room and my boss was sitting there. He said, "peewee!!!!" I said, "Pooh-Bah!!!" Well, that's what ended up getting him fired in the long run. He called me "peewee" in front of everybody else. He worked for the HR Director and the HRD called him aside after the meeting and told him that calling me "peewee" was discriminatory harassment.

Anyhow, the meeting was about more of an IT issue, how will we establish a login password for this training presentation? There are ten thousand employees and the last name overlap is rampant. It went round and round the table and I suggested, on the speaker phone on the board room table, "How about last name and then the last three digits of the social security number?"

Crickets. Silence in that room. The conversation stopped, I mean for quite a few seconds. Then it started back up, random ideas from all over the map. About two minutes later a lady...From the sound of it on my end of the phone I could almost picture where she was sitting in the room. She said, "HEY! What about last name and the last three digits of the social security number?" More silence and then there was just about a round of applause. Everybody cheered, "That's a GREAT idea!!!" They all called her by name and congratulated her for being so brilliant. I just threw my hands up on the other end of the phone.

And they never even used the training package. It never rolled out. That's life at Corporate. And a lady I worked with DID come down with stress-related thyroid cancer, the doctor told her it was highly most likely caused by stress.

[SuperBuickGuy]

I called into a board room meeting, I was on assignment at one of the mills in the southeast. My boss was the Training Director for Corporate. He was stationed at the corporate. The issue at hand was a training package that I had been working on for months in tandem with a contractor. A PowerPoint presentation about Internet Security. Everybody was going to have to go through it. I mean EVERYBODY.

So I got connected to the speakerphone on the table in the board room and my boss was sitting there. He said, "peewee!!!!" I said, "Pooh-Bah!!!" Well, that's what ended up getting him fired in the long run. He called me "peewee" in front of everybody else. He worked for the HR Director and the HRD called him aside after the meeting and told him that calling me "peewee" was discriminatory harassment.

Anyhow, the meeting was about more of an IT issue, how will we establish a login password for this training presentation? There are ten thousand employees and the last name overlap is rampant. It went round and round the table and I suggested, on the speaker phone on the board room table, "How about last name and then the last three digits of the social security number?"

Crickets. Silence in that room. The conversation stopped, I mean for quite a few seconds. Then it started back up, random ideas from all over the map. About two minutes later a lady...From the sound of it on my end of the phone I could almost picture where she was sitting in the room. She said, "HEY! What about last name and the last three digits of the social security number?" More silence and then there was just about a round of applause. Everybody cheered, "That's a GREAT idea!!!" They all called her by name and congratulated her for being so brilliant. I just threw my hands up on the other end of the phone.

And they never even used the training package. It never rolled out. That's life at Corporate. And a lady I worked with DID come down with stress-related thyroid cancer, the doctor told her it was highly most likely caused by stress.

and now you know why I do conference calls with judges in my bathrobe or, if etiquette must be maintained (meaning the client is sitting in), shorts. I also know that if I was a judge, I'd wear nothing under the robe. Nothing, at all.

[RockJustRock]

I called into a board room meeting, I was on assignment at one of the mills in the southeast. My boss was the Training Director for Corporate. He was stationed at the corporate. The issue at hand was a training package that I had been working on for months in tandem with a contractor. A PowerPoint presentation about Internet Security. Everybody was going to have to go through it. I mean EVERYBODY.
So I got connected to the speakerphone on the table in the board room and my boss was sitting there. He said, "peewee!!!!" I said, "Pooh-Bah!!!" Well, that's what ended up getting him fired in the long run. He called me "peewee" in front of everybody else. He worked for the HR Director and the HRD called him aside after the meeting and told him that calling me "peewee" was discriminatory harassment.
Anyhow, the meeting was about more of an IT issue, how will we establish a login password for this training presentation? There are ten thousand employees and the last name overlap is rampant. It went round and round the table and I suggested, on the speaker phone on the board room table, "How about last name and then the last three digits of the social security number?"
Crickets. Silence in that room. The conversation stopped, I mean for quite a few seconds. Then it started back up, random ideas from all over the map. About two minutes later a lady...From the sound of it on my end of the phone I could almost picture where she was sitting in the room. She said, "HEY! What about last name and the last three digits of the social security number?" More silence and then there was just about a round of applause. Everybody cheered, "That's a GREAT idea!!!" They all called her by name and congratulated her for being so brilliant. I just threw my hands up on the other end of the phone.
And they never even used the training package. It never rolled out. That's life at Corporate. And a lady I worked with DID come down with stress-related thyroid cancer, the doctor told her it was highly most likely caused by stress.

Last Name, Last Four. If you've ever dealt with the VA standard protocol. I got comic books, particularly book type comic books printed. One sold great as a comic, better as a book then became a movie. The book type book was NOT planned.

Nobody remembers, few know. I know, I guess that is all that matters.

I've never heard stress can cause Cancer, but I know it can REALLY mess up your thyroid function. BOY do I know THAT! BUT in the 80s Thyroid was a reason to rule OUT job stress. Wrong Place, wrong time. Been there done that no shirt, no hat. Actually I want the shirt. It would say Thyroid Problem.... What's YOUR excuse?