Jaguar Land Rover asking for a loan....Pause on EV development

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So do we keep bailing out and lending money to car manufacturers then??

The argument for giving Nissan support to move to Sunderland in the 80s was that it would support the underlying economy as well.

The poignant part of the JLR support is that it is for a UK brand that is under foreign ownership. It seems that flogging off your industrial base still leaves you with the responsibilities when times are bad - and presumably less of the upside when things are bad.
 
Personally, as a fairly sensible family man who has long prioritised having savings over all the toys, I do find it morally difficult justifying propping up businesses that are so lean that they cannot survive 3-6 months of crisis. However, we consumers want everything as cheaply as possible so that buffer often gets sacrificed.

Some years ago the small company I worked for had a group of people turn up from one of the big UK companies to do some dilligence on us becoming a supplier on a new project. They were quite snotty about our size and our finances because of our dependency on just a few main customers due to our size. Our financial controller was quite robust back pointing out that we were quite used to big name companies (such as theirs) stretching payments by 6 months and that he maintained a reserve sufficient that if none of our customers paid us we would survive operationally several months - and they just chucked that back to say we clearly didn't use our capital properly and that concerned them because it constrained our growth and we were not ambitious.

The things is in pointing out the level of capital reserve was holding the company back was not wrong - it's quite possible that if the company had invested in taking on more staff (R&D or marketing) then it would have grown more - and contributed more to the economy.

OTOH with that approach at the first sign of trouble it might have contracted in size or actually tipped over.
 
JLR may be foreign owned but its operations are in the UK
 

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