Many corporations (not just car makers) do not have a downsize plan for fear that it means they are admitting there will be a downturn, and any way with the govt. bailouts they now have a downturn plan - ask govt for money. Everyone is looking at growth, growth growth rather than sustainable long term growth. One company I used to work for had set a rule in place that each brand had to achieve a certain growth target (I think it was 15% from memory) failure to do so for 4 successive quarters would mean the brand would be axed. 1 brand was consistently falling behind and it's growth only equated to just under population growth at the time (about 3% I think) anyway the heavies came in ready to get rid of this brand when one of the junior analysts pointed out the brand had market saturation and was quite profitable and there was no way known that it reach the growth target. My point is a lot of companies (and their shareholders) are obsessed with growth rather than maintaining the company and ensuring it can survive any downturns. Tell us something we dont know...? hahaa :P :P :P alot of public listed companies need to grow at a breakneck pace to justify their huge bonus payout and dividends to shareholders... thats the problem 'expectations'... CEO only cares about 1 thing the bottom line... he doesnt care about the grunts getting fired or the trimmings of the managers watever... those are HR and bean counters advices and he just executes the order... and the end of the day shareholders only judge the CEO base on their bottom line performance rather than if he had hug any trees or help an old lady to cross the road... Look at Alan Moss... huge payout when he bail just before the honeymoon collapsed... yes Macq Bank made crap loads of money and acquisitions but just how liquid the bank actually is, is anyone's guess because all the bean counters would have used all sorts of methods to conceal the blackholes in the balance sheet or hide losses here and there to throw shareholders off that the bank is actually struggling... At the end its the public that had to bail those morons out, so i guess we are doubled screwed over... on one hand some of us on the forum might already lost their jobs and yet have to fork their tax money over to save the company/banks etc... __________________________ Obama got the approval needed for another 800 billion plus bail out package... and the republicans not one of them voted in favour of the package, is it coz they wanna save their collective ***** or they reckon its futile? Ford also just posted record lost of wat 8 billion? its a nightmare over there atm... who loses out... its the grunts... who bails the companies out...? then grunts... :( at the end of the day isent it the consumers fault our greed drives these companies, our credit is thru the roof, when u play with money thats not yours it creats an inbalence not to be quoted im just an idiot, but i try :(