Summit Notebook
Exclusive outtakes from industry leaders
AUDIO – What’s going on with the economy? Ask a trucker.
That was the advice from truck manufacturer Navistar International Corp’s CEO Dan Ustian at this week’s Reuters Manufacturing and Transportation Summit in Chicago.
Ustian said the current slowdown has been worse and deeper than expected — even though the trucking industry had a sense that things were starting to go south as far back as 2007.
Ustian, one of our featured guests on the first day of the summit, told Reuters that the trucking industry is a great place for people to start if they want to get a good read on the economy. Most things that are made in the U.S. get where they’re going with the help of a truck somewhere along the way.
The breadth of the company’s businesses supports his view.
Navistar is a manufacturer of commercial trucks, IC Bus, LLC (IC) brand buses, MaxxForce brand diesel engines, Workhorse Custom Chassis, LLC (WCC) brand chassis for motor homes and step vans, Navistar Defense, LLC military vehicles, and is a provider of service parts for all makes of trucks and trailers. Additionally, it also designs and manufactures diesel engines for pickup trucks, vans, and SUVs.
Audio – The waiting is the hardest part
For Marc Holliday, chief executive of SL Green Realty Group and Gramercy Capital Corp, the Tom Petty lyrics ring especially true.
Holliday, speaking at the Reuters Global Real Estate Summit, said on Tuesday that his company is waiting with bated breath to hear about which company has won the award to expand the gaming options at New York City’s borough of Queens-located Aqueduct Race Track.
Audio – Bubbles are fun — for awhile
Sure thing, kids LOVE the bubbles. The blowing, the running around, the popping.
All the things that gives real estate investors and developers fits.
Any simple search on “real estate” in a news story for the past two years would more than likely also mention the word “bubble”. In fact, a quick Google search of “real estate” and “bubble” turned up 998 news stories — in the past month!
Feldstein: NYC housing market “priced in euros and pesos”
Asked if weakness in the New York real estate market – which has been fairly resilient so far – could signal a bottom for the battered U.S. housing market, the head of the influential National Bureau of Economic Research said :
”No, no no! The New York real estate market is priced in euros and pesos,” Martin Feldstein said, referring to overseas investors snapping up property in the Big Apple which for them works out as a relative bargain because of the weak dollar.
