Ford Loses Money While Unemployment Rate Rises Commercial Paper New Homes Sales

(Best Syndication News) Ford Motor Company reports that they lost $14.6 billion in 2008, the worst year ever for the automaker. Management blamed the bad economy for their woes. Allan Mullally, Fords president and chief executive said in a statement: Ford and the entire auto industry faced an extraordinary slowdown in all major global markets in the fourth quarter that clearly had an impact on our results.

The company posted revenue of $146.3 billion for the year. That compares to revenue of $172.5 million in 2007, when it had a loss of $2.7 billion. As expected, Ford said it will use its full $10.1 billion line of credit. Shares were down 8 cents Thursday closing $1.95. On May 1st 2008 shares were trading for $8.48. Back in April 1999 shares were trading for 37.07. There was a stock split in August 2000.




Last week we reported that low prices have spurred a boom in existing home sales. That information came from the National Association of Realtors. On Thursday the U.S. Census Bureau reports that new home sales fell to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 331,000 in December 2008. Sales are down nearly 15 percent from November. This is the lowest on records dating back to 1963.

Jobless numbers are the worst in more than 40 years. The Labor Department reports that there were 4.78 million Americans claiming unemployment benefits. The seasonally adjusted unemployment rate was 3.6 percent. That is up .2 percent from the week before. Non-seasonally adjusted numbers indicate a rate of 4.3 percent for the week ending January 17th 2009. That is a .1 percent increase.

One of the problems facing the economy is the lack of credit. The Federal Reserve reports that the outstanding commercial paper dropped the most ever this week. For the week ending January 28, outstanding commercial paper fell $98.8 billion to $1.59 trillion. That is the largest weekly decrease since 2001 when the Fed started tracking volumes of this short-term corporate debt.

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• unemployment
• rate
• ford
• motor
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• jobless
• housing
• sales
• existing
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• home