Volkswagen: A No-Brainer Contrarian Investment

European leaders are loosening the economic shackles once demanded by Germany as the recession and mounting unemployment in southern Europe shove aside the debt crisis as the euro area’s biggest headache. A two-day Brussels summit starting Thursday will endorse plans for “structural” assessments of national budgets, according to a draft statement, using code for granting countries such as France, Spain and Portugal extra time to bring down deficits.

European leaders are loosening the economic shackles once demanded by Germany as the recession and mounting unemployment in southern Europe shove aside the debt crisis as the euro area’s biggest headache. A two-day Brussels summit starting Thursday will endorse plans for “structural” assessments of national budgets, according to a draft statement, using code for granting countries such as France, Spain and Portugal extra time to bring down deficits.

Gray Television, Inc. (GTN) March 04, 2013 4:20 pm ET Executives James C. Ryan - Chief Financial Officer and Senior Vice President Hilton H. Howell - Vice Chairman, Chief Executive Officer and Member of Executive Committee Analysts Aaron Watts - Deutsche Bank AG, Research Division Ethan McAfee - Ramsey Asset Management, LLC Presentation

Eurozone GDP sunk .2% in the second quarter and is clearly back in recession as a whole. For that matter, the eurozone has been in recession all year if not starting in the final quarter of 2011.

WOLFSBURG, Germany (Reuters) - A top German union official will explain to hourly employees at Volkswagen's U.S. plant in early June that his group will not pressure them to join the United Auto Workers union, the automaker's top labor representative said on Thursday. The UAW is relying heavily on the IG Metall, which has members on VW's works council, to help it organize German-owned U.S. plants because the German union has influence with VW management. ...

The market spurted higher mid-morning over new and improved credit lines by the IMF, and another never-ending discussion by the Fed about increasing liquidity. Bloomberg reports IMF Revamps Credit Lines to Lure Nations

MENZIE CHINN directs us to an excellent new paper from the OECD (actually a chapter from its forthcoming economic outlook) on the crisis of sustained, high long-term unemployment. It's worth a read; I wish I could quote whole swathes of it. One key point that is reiterated in the report is the fact that high unemployment is mostly due to an historically low rate of exit from joblessness.

In its effort to become the No. 1 automaker, VW has diluted the character of the Jetta for the U.S. market to the point where it's now good at a lot of things but great at very little.With Halloween around the corner, imagine for a moment Volkswagen's Jetta as a piece of candy.