Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of TARP!

The media's ability to miss the parallels between news items never ceases to amaze me. The past few days have seen a lot of coverage of the modern-day buccaneers seizing ships off the East African coast, and extorting ransoms from the owners. These latter-day Long John Silvers have got their grapple hooks on a (full) oil super-tanker - for context it is about the size of an aircraft carrier. Such crimes have been going on for years, and in other major shipping lanes too- the South China Sea and Malacca Straights spring to mind. The Somali pirates have 14 vessels anchored in their port right now, including - I kid you not - a shipment of over 30 T-72 tanks.

Anyway, I digress. Back in Washington, a bunch of Detroit Pirates are trying to pillage the TARP. Having sailed up the Potomac in their rusty barge, they are now waving their brittle cutlasses at Congress. They are demanding a $25 Bln ransom from taxpayers to avoid "catastrophe", although they seem to ignore the fact that the problems are mostly of their own design (have they never heard of inventory management?). "Surrender the bailout", you might say.

Yet fear not, for I have a solution that will make both the Somali pirates and Detroit carmakers happy. This interesting blog item highlights the mountain of unsold vehicles coming out of container ships at Long Beach. The only people making hay out of this are the port land owners renting out car parking space.

So here is my solution - get those container ships to cruise along the Horn of Africa, and wait for the pirates to do their raiding party tricks. Result: car inventories drop, and pirates get their boarding practice. Aargh-hargh! GM SUV shipments ahoy!