Week ended 28 February 2009 – Cash for scrapping your car!
Posted by admin on 1 March, 2009 under Weekly business news summary | 
2 Comments to Read
How do you fancy getting cash for your old car if the UK Government go for a scheme recommended by the AA and of course backed by car manufacturers, whereby owners of cars receive a cash incentive to scrap their old car in favour of a new one.
In Germany car owners already receive €2,500 (£2,209) and France gives €1,000 (£883) to people who own cars to encourage them to buy new. There is argument that this policy is not only good to keep the car industry moving, but also is a “Green” one, as it gets the old less CO2 efficient cars off the road replacing them with up-to-date “green” cars. However, the UK Government is not convinced that this new “scrappage” system is a good one.
China is up-beat for Jaguar and Landrover with it’s business partner in China having ordered a combined 13,000 cars of Jaguar and Landrovers, which is great news for the UK and in particular where their plants mostly in the north of England.
The end of the week saw Lloyds announcing profits down by 80% year on year to £807 million and that HBOS reporting a loss of £10.8 billion, which Lloyds took over in January 2009. However, this huge loss is not as high as the record loss suffered by The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) earlier this week amounting to £24.1 billion!
There are some huge numbers being banned about right now with the bank bail-outs and huge corporate losses, but nothing to compare with the Obama’s $3.6 trillion (£2.52 trillion) budget for this year! Now that is one enormous amount of money and in written format it looks like this $3,600,000,000,000, which is one whole lot of zeros!
Within this budget figure Obama has set aside a further $250 billion (£175 billion) for the banks with the main aim of his budget to see the US through the financial crisis.
End of the week saw:
Stock exchanges:
FTSE 100: 3,830
DOW: 7,063
S&P: 735
Nikkei: 7,568
Currencies
UK Sterling £ to US Dollar $ 1.43105
UK Sterling £ to Euro € 1.13194
UK Sterling £ to Japanese Yen 139.544
UK Sterling £ to Aus $ 2.24409
US Dollar $ to Euro € 0.790985
US Dollar $ to Japanese Yen 97.4944
Commodities
Nymex Crude oil – $44.25
Gold – $941.60
almir said,
amazing how so many companies are losing out big time but at least you can make money from scrapping your vehicle
mickey said,
The cash for cars program is another giveaway that America can not afford. One of these days we are going to come to our senses and realize we have to make choices with a limited amount of money, much like people do with their home budgets. America can not afford everything contrary to popular belief. It would be nice to get the older, more polluting cars off the road, but at what expense and who should pay that money?
mickey’s last blog post..Government outrage instead of accountability
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