Would you buy a Toyota?

With Toyota preparing a global recall of its new Prius and rolling out a fix to eight other models with a brake problem, the world’s largest automaker has its work cut out to regain the confidence of consumers.

The company has already reported a 16 percent sales drop for January, allowing Ford and GM to surge past it in the U.S. market. And the news has only got worse for Toyota this month.

So we’re curious: who would buy a Toyota right now? Take our polls and leave us a comment. If you’re sticking with the brand, tell us why.

from Jeremy Gaunt:

Help me! What year are we in?

The late language maven William Safire would have been helpful at this point but, as stated, he is late, having passed away in 2009.

So here's my problem for you. The year that Safire passed away in -- excuse me -- in which Safire passed away, is nearly always expressed verbally as two-thousand-and-nine. Occasionally, a  person might say just two-thousand-nine, but that is just sloppy. It is rarely, if ever, expressed as twenty-oh-nine.

What year are we in now, then? Is it two-thousand-and-ten as the past decade's use would suggest? Or is it twenty-ten, as in ninteeen-sixty-eight and so on?

Before you answer, however, consider this:

from Global Investing:

RIP 2008-2009

It was down, down, down in 2008 and up, up , up in 2009. So what will 2010 bring?

from Global Investing:

What’s on your reading list?

If anyone needed a reminder that Christmas and NewYear holidays are almost here, Societe Generale has provided it. Analyst Dylan Grice has picked up the mantle of the departed James Montier to offer a seasonal reading list for those with a fixation about investment and economics.

True, some people might prefer to immerse themselves in a rollicking sea tale from Patrick O'Brian or a good old  Sookie Stackhouse vampire mystery. But we know that Reuters blogs' readers are a discriminating lot with a keen understanding of and passion for finance. So here is Dylan's list of six must-reads:

1. Manias, Panics and Crashes, by Charles P. Kindleberger; 2. The Essays of Warren Buffet, edited by Richard Cunningham; 3. Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, by Edwin Lefevre; 4. Fooled by Randomness, by Nassim Taleb; 5. The Case against the Fed, by Murray Rothbard; 6. Judgement under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases, eds Kahneman, Slovic and Tversky.

So what is your reading list? Tell us what you would include  and why.

from UK News:

Raging against the X Factor machine

Simon Cowell says the Internet campaign to keep X factor winner Joe McElderry from the coveted Christmas No. I  spot is aimed at him rather than the type of music the show produces.

He calls the campaign stupid.

But critics of the show loathe what they call the "karaoke" of X Factor and thousands have backed the push to get an anti-establishment track by American rockers Rage Against the Machine up into the top slot next week.

The band's guitarist Tom Morello told the BBC: "I think people are just fed-up of being spoonfed some overblown sugary ballad that sits on top of the charts. It’s a little dose of anarchy for the holidays, it’s good for the soul.”

from Global Investing:

Time to kick Russia out of the BRICs?

It may end up sounding like a famous ball-point pen maker, but an argument is being made that Goldman Sach's famous marketing device, the BRICs, should really be the BICs. Does Russia really deserve to be a BRIC, asks Anders Åslund, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, in an article for Foreign Policy.

Åslund, who is also co-author with Andrew Kuchins of "The Russian Balance Sheet", reckons the Russia of Putin and Medvedev is just not worthy of inclusion alongside Brazil, India and China  in the list of blue-chip economic powerhouses. He writes:

The country's economic performance has plummeted to such a dismal level that one must ask whether it is entitled to have any say at all on the global economy, compared with the other, more functional members of its cohort.

I have just returned from Moscow, which is always dreary around this season. But this year, the mood among the capital's eloquent liberal economists has hit a new low. For the last seven years, Russia has undertaken no significant economic reforms. Instead, the state has been living off oil and gas, like a lucky but undeserving rentier."

Murdoch mad as hell and ready to charge

Rupert Murdoch is mad as hell and it appears he’s not going to take it anymore. The media mogul and News Corp chief is upset at Google, saying the Internet search giant is ruining the newspaper business.

Not one to sit and around and just gripe about things, Murdoch says he might pull News Corp’s news from Google’s Web search results and list the stories on Microsoft’s Bing. The catch is that Microsoft would pay for the service, giving Murdoch a fresh revenue stream.

The problem is that many news organizations are fed their Web audience via Google search. If viewer rates fall, so too, the theory says, will ad dollars.

If it works, however, you can bet big dollars that other publishers and content providers will follow suit.

from MacroScope:

Crisis? What Crisis?

The title of this post is taken from two sources. One was a headline in British tabloid, The Sun, in January 1979, when then-prime minister James Callaghan denied that strike-torn Britain was in chaos. The second was the title of a 1975 album by prog rock band Supertramp that famously showed someone sunbathing amidst the grey awfulness of the declining industrial landscape.

Are we now getting blasé about the latest crisis? Not so long ago, perfectly respectable economists and financial analysts were talking about a new Great Depression. The world was on the brink, it was said. Now, though, consensus appears to be that it is all over bar the shouting. The world is safe.

Wealth managers at Barclays have gone as far as telling their clients to get over it.

Move past the crisis .... The past year's events were deeply traumatic for most investors, but now is the time to move on, and take a more "business as usual" approach ...."

Should Barack Obama be in Berlin to mark the fall of the Berlin Wall?

There is one world leader who is not coming to Berlin to mark the 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall’s fall -U.S. President Barack Obama. Much to the chagrin of the German government that spent months trying to get him, Obama won’t be here. It’s turned into a bit of a political controversy in the United States.

But it’s also intriguing to Germans and German media. Why isn’t Obama here? Berlin loves (most) American presidents — going back to John F. Kennedy’s “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech. Is there more than meets the eye to Obama’s decision not to come?

Obama, of course, wanted to speak at the Brandenburg Gate in July 2008, when he was only the Democratic candidate. Merkel intervened to prevent that from happening — he ended up giving the speech a few km away at the Victory Column. Tomorrow, Obama could have spoken at the Brandenburg Gate.

Obama did come back to Berlin after that speech in front of 200,000 spectators as presidential candidate (www.reuters.com) last year — but only as a wax figure at Madame Tussauds (photo) The life-like creation was included at Madame Tussauds in Berlin, just a few blocks east of the Brandenburg Gate, in January.

from FaithWorld:

POLL: Is Goldman Sachs “doing God’s work”? Its CEO thinks so

Check out the headline at the bottom left of the Sunday Times front page. The man the London paper calls the most powerful banker on Earth says he is "just a banker 'doing God’s work'" .

The report says Goldman Sachs chief executive Lloyd Blankfein"proudly pays himself more in a year than most of us could ever dream of — $68m in 2007 alone, a record for any Wall Street CEO, to add to the more than $500m of Goldman stock he owns" .

Goldman Sachs looks set to pay about $20 billion in bonuses for its top traders this year, at a time when the fallout from last year's financial crisis is still being felt and the United States unemployment rate has hit 10.2 percent, a 26-1/2-year high.