Ford (F) Hits Its Worst Case Scenario

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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Ford1"Worst case scenario" is a term used by people who have been out of business school for less that two years. It is a buffoon’s way of saying that a firm has gone directly to the Ninth Circle of Hell in the Inferno section of Dante’s The Divine Comedy.

Ford posted its worst day since the company nearly went bankrupt at the end of WW II. The family brought in Henry Ford II, or "HF, The Deuce" as he was known, to fix his grandfather’s operation.

Both Henry Fords are dead and Ford Motor Company is the worse for that.

The car firm’s PR people had the gall to lead off the Ford release on last month’s sales by saying "Higher demand for the fuel-efficient Ford Focus and Ford Escape continued in August, as consumers continued moving to smaller and more fuel-efficient vehicles."

Pushed further down the page were the terrible numbers which showed Ford’s total sales down almost 27% to 155,690. SUV sales were down 53% to under 11,000. Sales of the firm’s flagship, the F-150 pick-up were off almost 42%.

No matter what anyone says, Ford cannot survive selling 155,000 vehicles a month in the US. If gas prices don’t fall sharply along with a recovery of consumer spending, there won’t be much of the company left.

Douglas A. McIntyre

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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