Swedish carmaker Saab is to be shut down by General Motors after the collapse of a last-ditch attempt to sell it to Dutch sports car manufacturer Spyker.
GM announced today that with "regret" it was starting an orderly wind-down of 62-year-old Saab's operations.
One cannot really be sad over this; the company had one profitable year in the last 25 and with no prospect of turning the tides this is the logical thing to do, to scrap the stupid thing.
However, there’s two things here to understand.
Firstly this means that yet another manufacturing firm in Sweden goes bye bye. The slowly deteriorating producing capacity of Sweden is far more dangerous than any current crisis or deficit. The future will not hold any good cards for my birth-nation if this continues. Remember, wealth needs to be created by producing. Bureaucrats, politicians and different useless service occupations are only a cost that at the very most can help us with everyday things which may save us time, they don’t, however, create value. SAAB, though being a worthless company that should be scraped, still produces more value than all government bodies put together and in this sense this is a loss.
Secondly, one of the car-companies that actually is in worse shape than SAAB is the owner General Motors. GM got billions in bail-outs, and is now more or less run by the fascist American administration that, among other things, have fired management that didn’t fit the profile the masters wanted. And GM hasn’t only fucked up their own products, they've messed up the Saab brand; they messed up Pontiac and they're currently in the process of messing up Chevrolet, to mention a few screw ups.
Kudos to the Swedish leftie government for once doing the right thing and letting this idiocy go down the toilet. Too bad the same cannot be said about GM and the US.
Oh, and marry X-mas!
Just one thing. The current government in Sweden is liberal. The Socialistic opposition for a moment said (as usual) that they would save SAAB with tax funds.
ReplyDelete'liberal' in the english speaking world means "left". However, I'm guessing you mean its a non-left government which is BS. A government that impose more restrictions, creates more laws and put higher taxation on gasoline cannot and will not be nothing else but left. Socialism isn't really the word, but more that than anything else besides maybe fascism. That the communists and other idiots in opposition wants to throw money around isn't something new. They always have more of your and mine money.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you in basics but your are wrong about GM fucking up SAAB. SAAB was fucked up long before which is why we sold it to them. The SAAB engineers running the company thought that if you make a car good enough it will sell itself. This is obviously wrong and well proven. It used to be a great innovative car (turbo etc) but still did not sell. GM are americans, e.g. can't make good cars nor sell them which means they are going down. Now a days I think you need to know HOW to sell a GREAT car.
ReplyDeleteBetter to use Trollhättans competence to do something else, perhaps build other cars that do sell or invent something else. I see no point, even though in the short run it's good from our countries perspective to have SAAB, to continue building this piece of craps that no one wants.