You're correct, however, I'd say especially young women are operating from a stronger negotiating position, and so would prefer not to express her true intentions as openly as men do, lest she erode her position of strenth. As an example, women get just as struck by a cute boy as men are by a cute girl, but they almost never express it in an open way (since that would remove all doubt that she's very willing to reproduce). If she says nothing but drops clues instead, she's not as open to a different man deciding she's easy.
Montana also has no sales tax (except in West Yellowstone). Good for retirees, but for a state with so much of the economy supported by tourism, you'd think the state would want to tax some of that.
Women generally think the same way men do (slightly more cautious but it's pretty moot), but after they think it they do a kabuki dance of decit to cover of their tracks. The trick with women is to learn what they actually want which is almost always very different from what they say they want (but they would lose power if they were direct).
It's biggest competitors are the Accord and Camry, most reviews place the current Malibu as competitive with both (and a better value than either). Mid-Sized cars in the US are the largest market segment (many current midsized cars were introduced as compacts but have grown over the years and been replaced with newer compact models).
I've never seen it advertised, but then I watch traditionally guy stuff where it's all trucks, beer, and sports cars.
And your link doesn't provide much justification, after rolling out a new Saturn campaign with lots of airtime, Saturn sales are down 50% from last year. I don't see how that means anything about Chevy sales (since your own link pointed out that a decent number of folks don't associate Saturn with GM.
I heard about the Malibu on an NPR story, during one of the times GM went beggin in DC, and then saw an article about them in the WSJ, I've driven one as a rental and it was a fine car, not really my style, granted that was only a week of driving, but much better than the new Pontiac I rented when my car was hit a few years ago. When so many varied reviews say, this car is as good as the Japanese offerings, it's worth taking notice especially when popular perception is that GM still generally isn't as good as foreign cars.
Personally, I've never bought a new car in my life and doubt I'll start now, but the financial crisis has got me browsing for a newer car to perhaps replace my 12 year old integra and my wife's 15 year old volvo.
Technically they aren't part of bank capital requirements since those would be assets, and capital is basically equity (there are some other things--loss reserves and some parts of equity that don't count), but you're generally correct that AAA MBS don't have a 100% capital requirement (or a very high capital requirement) which is likely what you meant.
The new Chevy Malibu is almost universally regarded as the best car in it's class. Sticker is cheaper than it's peers (Altima, Accord, Camry) except the Camry, and after incentives it's the lowest price of the bunch. Their sales are up 50% from last year (and it's not all just rental companies), so plenty of folks are deciding that GM is doing something right.
Actually the Eclipse is assembled in Normal, Illinois (along with the Plymoth Laser and Eagle Talon).
Most of Detroit's problems stem from their inability to make small cars people want, and being forced by congress to make lots of small cars (CAFE requires manufacturers to have a certain fleet average fuel economy and it applies separately to domestic and foreign made cars). So Detroit must build a huge number of small cars that no one wants and sell them at a big loss. But it does keep a ton of Union shops open which allows Congress to not have to make hard or unpopular/decisions (because Detroit has to make them instead). The rest came from swapping pension benefits for salary increases and not putting enough money in the pensions when the changes were made (what good is financial engineering if you don't get extra profits from it anyway)?
That's because your paper is a regional. Classified is the highest margin business for local papers. They essentially had a local monopoly on small scale local trade advertising. Craigslist showed them that the marginal cost of such ads in the internet age was near 0.
I think the problem with that is that it keeps an entire thread on a single page and since the first thread is long, if it's long enough to drag onto the second page, too, you have to skip a page to see what's beyond it. I just bumped my comments/page pref and rarely see multipage threads.
Since there's going to be one, i'd much rather it be on a website where no one is bothered by it (except seedy motel guests) than putting all the goods on display in the Financial district/abandoned downtown.
Anyone who drives nails all day switched to a pneumatic nail gun years ago. Faster and better. They're not expensive, and they'll save you a fortune in labor costs. The hammer is for pulling nails and the occasional nail in an odd location (so the handle doesn't matter nearly as much). Just for the record, I prefer the feel of hickory to rubber when I'm hammering all day.
In a similar vein, there are some recent studies that suggest that most of the benefit of medicine is the temporary status transfer from a high status individual paying more attention to the patient which perversely causes them to get better. That goes along with the idea that it's important to get your chance to get that status boost.
The other factor that doesn't get mentioned is that Americans have many pleasurable habits that are associated with negative health outcomes. If Americans eat red meat 10x/week, drink heavily, and exercise less than their first world peers, that medical spending (on end of life care) might be buying them more extra time than is captured by naive comparisons.
Because as it stands now, apple probably has high enough margins on the laptops they sell that they don't want to risk cannabalizing that profit for a low end mac that even if it boosts volume might not boost it enough to offset the loss of profits from people who would buy a cheaper laptop but buy a high end mac because they want a mac. In otherwords selling a million laptops with a per unit profit of $500 is better than selling 10 million laptops with a unit profit of $35.
Yeah, farm subsidies are a ridiculous waste of resources (and they screw the poorer farmers in other nations. I've never understood how our left wing hasn't started attacking them for fairness to other countries' farmers, I guess they're not as sexy as other nation's coastal cities. Plus, they make bad farmers up here (too many American and European farmers are better lobbyists rather than farmers).
It's too bad South American beef isn't more readily available. It's very good!
AIG FP (the London office) didn't take in huge premiums which is the problem. They failed because most of the derivatives they wrote require collateral to be posted based on AIG's credit rating and the price of the insured risk (or market price of the derivative). Those collateral requirements required about 70 billion in cash payments to escrow accounts (they technically don't go to the counterparties until the default events occur, which hasn't happened yet. Prices have dropped because, it's become obvious that a huge number of home owners are going to default on their mortgage.
Oh and they had $120 billion set aside at the end of 2006. As it turns out it was not nearly enough, but they were setting the revenues aside. Also, they were in compliance with the reserve requirements set by their regulators. The problem wasn't reserves, it was a severe misreading of the risks they took on for the premiums received. However, their pricing was more than sufficient if mortgage holders don't stop paying in numbers like 12%. They misjudged the risk that defaults and late payments would occur in numbers that large, but that doesn't absolve the irresponsible borrowers who are defaulting in droves because they are now realizing that their house bet is a loser (or they were using equity to pay the mortgage). Look at slide 15 on this presentation (warning pdf). People pay keep their mortgage current enough if their house price rises. The next two slides shows how delinquencies rise and fall unrelated to mortgage defaults but house price appreciation is highly correlated with foreclosures, indicating that cash flow issues aren't the main driver of defaults it's people deciding they aren't paying for a losing bet.
Yeah we should send them a bill when this is done. In our defense, had Europe's banks failed, ours would have too. England was in the midst of a bank run in October (Ireland & Estonia were due next). Spain would have followed soon after. If you think we wouldn't have had a dollar/bank run very quickly following effectively all of Europe's central banks failing, I don't know how to show you.
Did you follow what happened to Lehman? Derivative holders of which AIG has 2 trillion counterparties) are exempt from chapter 11 (and all other bankruptcy asset stays). They sieze collateral first (ironically that was added to the recent bankruptcy legislation to prevent a big bank failure from spreading through the banking system via derivative counterparties). Since they sieze collateral first they get better values and in the case of Lehman who started the process with $600 billion in assets and 550 billion in liabilities, only had $450 billion in assets and $550 billion in liabilities when they filed. That missing $100 billion started a run on money market funds. The hole with AIG would probably be in the neighborhood of $200 billion (even after the TARP funded collateralization payments). And then AIG's counterparty banks (mostly European but also domestic) don't have insurance on their loans so their regulators would require them to issue substantially more equity (which means they'd have to go to their governments--many of which would be in the midst of central bank runs--for support.
Had Lehman not caused everyone in both government and finance to realize that this is a very high rope and we have no net, AIG would have probably gone through chapter 11. http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1263
This American Life has a very good program on how close we came to a pretty nasty result.
I firmly agree, provided they release a detailed plan on how to sell/wind down the nationalized entities. As the conservatorship of Fannie and Freddie is showing, the government's crisis response goals are frequently opposed and impossible to manage. So you have to quickly sell the good stuff and let the deep pockets (government in this case) manage the bad assets in liquidation. They'd have to work something out to prevent derivative collateral harvesting. Conservatorship is triggers the same problems with asset siezure as bankruptcy under most derivative contracts.
The two times a financial crisis has been solved both did that (Sweeden and the Panic of 1907 when JP Morgan stepped in to save the banking system).
It's cheaper than bailing them out directly. The most direct is that AIG has insurance lines for things besides default. Until those businesses are sold they'll continue to generate money (unless all the employees leave because of stupid laws). When they're sold that money can support the costly default insurance and will reduce the overall bill to the government (versus a direct bailout). The second reason it's cheaper is that there's lots of default insurance that was written that is still profitable for AIG (it's a $500 billion book that is currently estimated to lose $60). If AIG fails the $360 billion that's not loss and collateral would have to be replaced (currently impossible since AIG was most of the primary market) or self insured. Regulators don't like self insurance so the banks that do this would have to hold vastly more capital (meaning they'd need gobs more government support because raising that much capital is probably impossible too). Finally, it's cheaper because AIG's failure would result in huge losses in the currently government guaranteed money market world.
After Lehman failed the only thing that kept there from being a run on the money market funds (rumors reached as much at 5 trillion in sell orders in a single day) was the announcment of a government guarantee. In a bankruptcy like AIG's derivative holders are have a sort of "god mode" where they can step in and cherry pick assets to meet their collateral requirements before the bankruptcy process begins. Since AIG has large derivative books (including the $500 billion credit derivatives they have about 1.5 trillion in more vanilla interest rate derivatives) who would swoop in and grap hundreds of billions in assets. Leaving vastly less for unsecured lenders. In essense this means paying AIG's losses twice. First to the banks who are now self insuring their portfolios, then a second time to money market and possibly other creditors. The total bill would probably run north of a half trillion, depending on how badly Europe was hurt and assuming no European banks failed (if there was a domino effect we all go back to farming).
Compared with that direct cost and the risk of far greater costs, bailing out AIG to the tune of say $200-$300 billion is a bargain (even if it's a very costly one). Shoeing talent out the door is the last thing we should strive to do at the firms the taxpayer now owns.
I'm pretty concerned that the leadership hasn't come out and explained this in clearer terms, rather than hype up anger (it's looking more likely to get someone killed soon).
You might want to look harder. All of AIG's losses directly as a result of consumers and home owners who stopped (or are soon expected to stop) paying their bills. AIG was dumb to insure that consumers would pay their bills (home bills were vastly too high) but if everyone continued to pay back what they'd promised AIG would have profitable if illiquid contracts.
We gave them money because if AIG fails, two huge things go down with them. First, Europe's big banks all of them (who used AIG to get cheap insurance--they'd suddenly need new equity on the order of 30-50 billion). Second, money market funds who would be facing much larger losses then they did with Lehman after all of AIG's derivative counterparties get first cut unsecured lenders would take huge haircuts, likely leading to several funds "breaking the buck" and a run on their virtual banks. Since sending $200 billion to AIG is much cheaper than dealing with the carnage those events would cause, the government holds its nose and hopes for the best.
Look on the bright side, with this method, the governments of the world (led by the US) would be paying for the losses anyway (both the businesses mentioned above are too big to fail) so by leaving AIG intact they get to capture the cashflows from the life, P&C and other solid insurance businesses.
That's not the fault of traders! That's the fault of take your pick from:
A) Easy money policy at the fed from a chairman who had too little questioning of his decisions
B) Paying much too high a price when they acquired said assets
C) Not being long term investors except in their own mind
D) Previous bailouts encouraging too much risk taking or too much retention of poor management
E) Too little regulation of businesses being promised a bailout
F) Too much leverage
G) Not paying attention to the above
Take your pick from the list. The traders are the messenger not the makers prices. Most of the changes come from other similar people liquidating and/or changing allocations. Investors seem to want an unregulated free for all in the good times but can't seem to tolerate that that means no one will be standing by to mop up the mess you made on the way back down. You can't have it both ways.
Scale doesn't help much, because most of the difference in costs relate to energy to manufacture vs energy output. Oil's cheap because the cost of storing that energy was paid by innumerable plants years ago. Our current cells are far more efficient than those plants' collectors but I can't grab them out of a hole in the desert. It's sort of foolish to burn a bunch of oil or natural gas to make something that in the case of PV might return only that amount of energy over the next 30 years. Your plant has a better EROEI, but it's still not competitive with an oilfield (or they'd be building it rather than marketing it for a congressional subsidy).
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You're correct, however, I'd say especially young women are operating from a stronger negotiating position, and so would prefer not to express her true intentions as openly as men do, lest she erode her position of strenth. As an example, women get just as struck by a cute boy as men are by a cute girl, but they almost never express it in an open way (since that would remove all doubt that she's very willing to reproduce). If she says nothing but drops clues instead, she's not as open to a different man deciding she's easy.
Yep except it's Superman instead. You grasp the lesson grasshopper!
Montana also has no sales tax (except in West Yellowstone). Good for retirees, but for a state with so much of the economy supported by tourism, you'd think the state would want to tax some of that.
Women generally think the same way men do (slightly more cautious but it's pretty moot), but after they think it they do a kabuki dance of decit to cover of their tracks. The trick with women is to learn what they actually want which is almost always very different from what they say they want (but they would lose power if they were direct).
It's biggest competitors are the Accord and Camry, most reviews place the current Malibu as competitive with both (and a better value than either). Mid-Sized cars in the US are the largest market segment (many current midsized cars were introduced as compacts but have grown over the years and been replaced with newer compact models).
North American Car of the Year, for starters.
Truth about cars: http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/chevrolet-malibu-review/
US News and World Report #1 affordability in mid sized sedans
Consumer Reports even gave it a pretty good review:
http://autos.msn.com/research/vip/ConsumerReportsSnapshot.aspx?year=2009&make=Chevrolet&model=Malibu
I've never seen it advertised, but then I watch traditionally guy stuff where it's all trucks, beer, and sports cars.
And your link doesn't provide much justification, after rolling out a new Saturn campaign with lots of airtime, Saturn sales are down 50% from last year. I don't see how that means anything about Chevy sales (since your own link pointed out that a decent number of folks don't associate Saturn with GM.
I heard about the Malibu on an NPR story, during one of the times GM went beggin in DC, and then saw an article about them in the WSJ, I've driven one as a rental and it was a fine car, not really my style, granted that was only a week of driving, but much better than the new Pontiac I rented when my car was hit a few years ago. When so many varied reviews say, this car is as good as the Japanese offerings, it's worth taking notice especially when popular perception is that GM still generally isn't as good as foreign cars.
Personally, I've never bought a new car in my life and doubt I'll start now, but the financial crisis has got me browsing for a newer car to perhaps replace my 12 year old integra and my wife's 15 year old volvo.
Technically they aren't part of bank capital requirements since those would be assets, and capital is basically equity (there are some other things--loss reserves and some parts of equity that don't count), but you're generally correct that AAA MBS don't have a 100% capital requirement (or a very high capital requirement) which is likely what you meant.
The new Chevy Malibu is almost universally regarded as the best car in it's class. Sticker is cheaper than it's peers (Altima, Accord, Camry) except the Camry, and after incentives it's the lowest price of the bunch. Their sales are up 50% from last year (and it's not all just rental companies), so plenty of folks are deciding that GM is doing something right.
Actually the Eclipse is assembled in Normal, Illinois (along with the Plymoth Laser and Eagle Talon).
Most of Detroit's problems stem from their inability to make small cars people want, and being forced by congress to make lots of small cars (CAFE requires manufacturers to have a certain fleet average fuel economy and it applies separately to domestic and foreign made cars). So Detroit must build a huge number of small cars that no one wants and sell them at a big loss. But it does keep a ton of Union shops open which allows Congress to not have to make hard or unpopular/decisions (because Detroit has to make them instead). The rest came from swapping pension benefits for salary increases and not putting enough money in the pensions when the changes were made (what good is financial engineering if you don't get extra profits from it anyway)?
That's because your paper is a regional. Classified is the highest margin business for local papers. They essentially had a local monopoly on small scale local trade advertising. Craigslist showed them that the marginal cost of such ads in the internet age was near 0.
I think the problem with that is that it keeps an entire thread on a single page and since the first thread is long, if it's long enough to drag onto the second page, too, you have to skip a page to see what's beyond it. I just bumped my comments/page pref and rarely see multipage threads.
Since there's going to be one, i'd much rather it be on a website where no one is bothered by it (except seedy motel guests) than putting all the goods on display in the Financial district/abandoned downtown.
Anyone who drives nails all day switched to a pneumatic nail gun years ago. Faster and better. They're not expensive, and they'll save you a fortune in labor costs. The hammer is for pulling nails and the occasional nail in an odd location (so the handle doesn't matter nearly as much). Just for the record, I prefer the feel of hickory to rubber when I'm hammering all day.
In a similar vein, there are some recent studies that suggest that most of the benefit of medicine is the temporary status transfer from a high status individual paying more attention to the patient which perversely causes them to get better. That goes along with the idea that it's important to get your chance to get that status boost.
The other factor that doesn't get mentioned is that Americans have many pleasurable habits that are associated with negative health outcomes. If Americans eat red meat 10x/week, drink heavily, and exercise less than their first world peers, that medical spending (on end of life care) might be buying them more extra time than is captured by naive comparisons.
Because as it stands now, apple probably has high enough margins on the laptops they sell that they don't want to risk cannabalizing that profit for a low end mac that even if it boosts volume might not boost it enough to offset the loss of profits from people who would buy a cheaper laptop but buy a high end mac because they want a mac. In otherwords selling a million laptops with a per unit profit of $500 is better than selling 10 million laptops with a unit profit of $35.
Yeah, farm subsidies are a ridiculous waste of resources (and they screw the poorer farmers in other nations. I've never understood how our left wing hasn't started attacking them for fairness to other countries' farmers, I guess they're not as sexy as other nation's coastal cities. Plus, they make bad farmers up here (too many American and European farmers are better lobbyists rather than farmers).
It's too bad South American beef isn't more readily available. It's very good!
AIG FP (the London office) didn't take in huge premiums which is the problem. They failed because most of the derivatives they wrote require collateral to be posted based on AIG's credit rating and the price of the insured risk (or market price of the derivative). Those collateral requirements required about 70 billion in cash payments to escrow accounts (they technically don't go to the counterparties until the default events occur, which hasn't happened yet. Prices have dropped because, it's become obvious that a huge number of home owners are going to default on their mortgage.
Oh and they had $120 billion set aside at the end of 2006. As it turns out it was not nearly enough, but they were setting the revenues aside. Also, they were in compliance with the reserve requirements set by their regulators. The problem wasn't reserves, it was a severe misreading of the risks they took on for the premiums received. However, their pricing was more than sufficient if mortgage holders don't stop paying in numbers like 12%. They misjudged the risk that defaults and late payments would occur in numbers that large, but that doesn't absolve the irresponsible borrowers who are defaulting in droves because they are now realizing that their house bet is a loser (or they were using equity to pay the mortgage). Look at slide 15 on this presentation (warning pdf). People pay keep their mortgage current enough if their house price rises. The next two slides shows how delinquencies rise and fall unrelated to mortgage defaults but house price appreciation is highly correlated with foreclosures, indicating that cash flow issues aren't the main driver of defaults it's people deciding they aren't paying for a losing bet.
Yeah we should send them a bill when this is done. In our defense, had Europe's banks failed, ours would have too. England was in the midst of a bank run in October (Ireland & Estonia were due next). Spain would have followed soon after. If you think we wouldn't have had a dollar/bank run very quickly following effectively all of Europe's central banks failing, I don't know how to show you. Did you follow what happened to Lehman? Derivative holders of which AIG has 2 trillion counterparties) are exempt from chapter 11 (and all other bankruptcy asset stays). They sieze collateral first (ironically that was added to the recent bankruptcy legislation to prevent a big bank failure from spreading through the banking system via derivative counterparties). Since they sieze collateral first they get better values and in the case of Lehman who started the process with $600 billion in assets and 550 billion in liabilities, only had $450 billion in assets and $550 billion in liabilities when they filed. That missing $100 billion started a run on money market funds. The hole with AIG would probably be in the neighborhood of $200 billion (even after the TARP funded collateralization payments). And then AIG's counterparty banks (mostly European but also domestic) don't have insurance on their loans so their regulators would require them to issue substantially more equity (which means they'd have to go to their governments--many of which would be in the midst of central bank runs--for support. Had Lehman not caused everyone in both government and finance to realize that this is a very high rope and we have no net, AIG would have probably gone through chapter 11. http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1263 This American Life has a very good program on how close we came to a pretty nasty result.
I firmly agree, provided they release a detailed plan on how to sell/wind down the nationalized entities. As the conservatorship of Fannie and Freddie is showing, the government's crisis response goals are frequently opposed and impossible to manage. So you have to quickly sell the good stuff and let the deep pockets (government in this case) manage the bad assets in liquidation. They'd have to work something out to prevent derivative collateral harvesting. Conservatorship is triggers the same problems with asset siezure as bankruptcy under most derivative contracts.
The two times a financial crisis has been solved both did that (Sweeden and the Panic of 1907 when JP Morgan stepped in to save the banking system).
It's cheaper than bailing them out directly. The most direct is that AIG has insurance lines for things besides default. Until those businesses are sold they'll continue to generate money (unless all the employees leave because of stupid laws). When they're sold that money can support the costly default insurance and will reduce the overall bill to the government (versus a direct bailout). The second reason it's cheaper is that there's lots of default insurance that was written that is still profitable for AIG (it's a $500 billion book that is currently estimated to lose $60). If AIG fails the $360 billion that's not loss and collateral would have to be replaced (currently impossible since AIG was most of the primary market) or self insured. Regulators don't like self insurance so the banks that do this would have to hold vastly more capital (meaning they'd need gobs more government support because raising that much capital is probably impossible too). Finally, it's cheaper because AIG's failure would result in huge losses in the currently government guaranteed money market world.
After Lehman failed the only thing that kept there from being a run on the money market funds (rumors reached as much at 5 trillion in sell orders in a single day) was the announcment of a government guarantee. In a bankruptcy like AIG's derivative holders are have a sort of "god mode" where they can step in and cherry pick assets to meet their collateral requirements before the bankruptcy process begins. Since AIG has large derivative books (including the $500 billion credit derivatives they have about 1.5 trillion in more vanilla interest rate derivatives) who would swoop in and grap hundreds of billions in assets. Leaving vastly less for unsecured lenders. In essense this means paying AIG's losses twice. First to the banks who are now self insuring their portfolios, then a second time to money market and possibly other creditors. The total bill would probably run north of a half trillion, depending on how badly Europe was hurt and assuming no European banks failed (if there was a domino effect we all go back to farming).
Compared with that direct cost and the risk of far greater costs, bailing out AIG to the tune of say $200-$300 billion is a bargain (even if it's a very costly one). Shoeing talent out the door is the last thing we should strive to do at the firms the taxpayer now owns.
I'm pretty concerned that the leadership hasn't come out and explained this in clearer terms, rather than hype up anger (it's looking more likely to get someone killed soon).
You might want to look harder. All of AIG's losses directly as a result of consumers and home owners who stopped (or are soon expected to stop) paying their bills. AIG was dumb to insure that consumers would pay their bills (home bills were vastly too high) but if everyone continued to pay back what they'd promised AIG would have profitable if illiquid contracts.
We gave them money because if AIG fails, two huge things go down with them. First, Europe's big banks all of them (who used AIG to get cheap insurance--they'd suddenly need new equity on the order of 30-50 billion). Second, money market funds who would be facing much larger losses then they did with Lehman after all of AIG's derivative counterparties get first cut unsecured lenders would take huge haircuts, likely leading to several funds "breaking the buck" and a run on their virtual banks. Since sending $200 billion to AIG is much cheaper than dealing with the carnage those events would cause, the government holds its nose and hopes for the best.
Look on the bright side, with this method, the governments of the world (led by the US) would be paying for the losses anyway (both the businesses mentioned above are too big to fail) so by leaving AIG intact they get to capture the cashflows from the life, P&C and other solid insurance businesses.
That's not the fault of traders! That's the fault of take your pick from:
A) Easy money policy at the fed from a chairman who had too little questioning of his decisions
B) Paying much too high a price when they acquired said assets
C) Not being long term investors except in their own mind
D) Previous bailouts encouraging too much risk taking or too much retention of poor management
E) Too little regulation of businesses being promised a bailout
F) Too much leverage
G) Not paying attention to the above
Take your pick from the list. The traders are the messenger not the makers prices. Most of the changes come from other similar people liquidating and/or changing allocations. Investors seem to want an unregulated free for all in the good times but can't seem to tolerate that that means no one will be standing by to mop up the mess you made on the way back down. You can't have it both ways.
Scale doesn't help much, because most of the difference in costs relate to energy to manufacture vs energy output. Oil's cheap because the cost of storing that energy was paid by innumerable plants years ago. Our current cells are far more efficient than those plants' collectors but I can't grab them out of a hole in the desert. It's sort of foolish to burn a bunch of oil or natural gas to make something that in the case of PV might return only that amount of energy over the next 30 years. Your plant has a better EROEI, but it's still not competitive with an oilfield (or they'd be building it rather than marketing it for a congressional subsidy).