Bizzy’s AM Coffee Biz-Econ-Life Links (060206)

Free Links:

• Delta pilots have agreed to new concessions — It seems as if that headline has been around for 15 years. Let’s hope it’s the last for quite a while.
• The Germans are please by the fall in their unemployment rate — to 10.8% from 11.5%. Hey, you’ve got to start somewhere.
• Google appears unlikely to create its own web browser — Smart move. Let everyone else worry about plugging security holes.
• This would appear to be a very good time to buy a Ford or GM vehicle — zero percent financing, prepaid gas cards, and aggressive rebates are all in vogue. This probably doesn’t say much for the Big Two’s ability to make money in the near term, but as long as the companies don’t disappear, that’s not your problem. If you’re curious, GM’s unit sales in May were down 16% from a year ago; Ford was down 2%, and Toyota was up 17%.
• Biz Bias example of the day — Here’s how the first four paragraphs from the actual press release for the Vistage Confidence Index read from the company that did the work to produce it:
  

  CEO economic confidence remains positive, but pace slows

  Chief executives of small and mid-sized businesses say the overall U.S. economy continues to improve, but its torrid pace of growth will slow during the second half of 2006, according to the Vistage quarterly CEO survey, the Vistage Confidence Index. With this positive economic outlook, CEOs still find hiring and retaining good people a more immediate concern than addressing rising energy costs or proposed immigration reform.

  The Vistage Confidence Index fell to 97.8 in Q2, 2006, down nearly seven points from the vigorous 104.2 established in Q1. More than 1,800 CEO members of Vistage International, the world’s largest CEO membership organization, responded to the Q2 survey.

  “Firms anticipate the economy is slowing from its robust pace, but it will continue to remain positive,” said Richard Curtin, Ph.D., a consultant for the Vistage Confidence Index and director of consumer surveys at the University of Michigan. “Overall, firms point to a continued economic expansion amid tight labor markets and heightened cost pressures.”

  “A nearly equal number of firms expect conditions to improve as to worsen in the next 12 months, in sharp contrast to a year ago when three times as many firms expected a faster, rather than a slower rate of economic growth,” said Dan Barnett, Chief Operating Officer of Vistage International.

  Although it played the story itself pretty straight, here’s what Reuters did with the headline:

  Survey: CEOs See Economic Growth Slowdown

  It would appear that the Reuters headline writer thought that it was his/her mission to tone down the enthusiasm. Doing that is not even their job, though based on their Wednesday treatment of the “wow” Midwest PMI report, it instead seems like their obsession.

• Caught green-handed (HT The Agitator via Instpundit) –
  

  Before President Bush touched down in Pennsylvania Wednesday to promote his nuclear energy policy, the environmental group Greenpeace was mobilizing.

  “This volatile and dangerous source of energy” is no answer to the country’s energy needs, shouted a Greenpeace fact sheet decrying the “threat” posed by the Limerick reactors Bush visited.

  But a factoid or two later, the Greenpeace authors were stumped while searching for the ideal menacing metaphor.

  We present it here exactly as it was written, capital letters and all: “In the twenty years since the Chernobyl tragedy, the world’s worst nuclear accident, there have been nearly [FILL IN ALARMIST AND ARMAGEDDONIST FACTOID HERE].”