Ryanair is the most successful airline in the world. Here's why:

Toyota's recall problem may be chickens coming home to roost after nearly two decades of 'decontenting'.

Toyota's reputation for quality was built on over-design, which made it a competitive juggernaut, but hurt its bottom-line. The solution was to redesign components to be 'good enough' rather than 'fat'.

Toyota may have saved the bottom line only to sacrifice its brand mythology.

I went long the BP ADR again today at $31.80 before BP's audience with Obama. We'll see. I play this game with a guaranteed stop loss.

Having worked in Shell for for 12 years and then run various commodity outfits round the world, including a spell as commercial director for an early entrant to deep-water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, it is cringemaking to see battle hardened oilmen like Tony Hayward of BP sitting opposite charlatans like Obama, Biden, Holder and Napolitano. Whatever BP's sins, the intellectual and operational gap is as wide as it gets. A multi-dimensional problem like running a vertically integrated mineral business stretches the mind and soul. Obama's only problem is "Does this make me look good?" Were Hayward to debate Obama on level terms, it would be like man and boy.

The $20 billion dollar shakedown of BP has set an unholy precedent which will reverberate thru US business interests overseas. Next time Exxon has a Russian style environmental audit at Sakhalin, what's to stop a Gazprom-friendly politician ordering up a few bill. in escrow money by citing the Obama example ?

BP screwed up unforgivably by the looks of it, albeit with the full, explicit knowledge of the relevant federal agencies, but it was meeting all its financial duties and has resources and cash flow to meet future liabilities. That refers to legal and moral liabilities, not economic losses from the imbecilic, US mandated 6 month drilling shutdown based on an expert report falsified by the Dept of Energy and disowned by the experts who wrote it.

This FT article asks a good question - how is the BP's escrow commitment to Obama legal without shareholder approval?

“I don’t get how [legally] BP can cancel an already declared dividend, and offer up $20 billion, without a shareholder vote. Nor why they’d do either of those things. If Obama insisted on a political headline, I’d have much rather it’d been Hayward’s scalp,” one trader said.

The article makes a nice point about one of Tony Hayward's possible successors, Robert Dudley:

Mr Dudley, an affable Mississippian, meanwhile, has been in the fray in Houston, managing the clean-up and is seen as having handled the public scrutiny better than his chief executive.

He was also at Mr Hayward and Mr Svanberg’s side during Wednesday’s meeting with Mr Obama.

Mr Dudley’s recent post as chief executive of TNK-BP, BP’s Russian partnership, gives him experience running a company in a host country with an unpredictably hostile government.

I twice bet long on BP recently and was twice stopped out. I'm back long the BP ADR at $29 and $31 and $33, always with downside protection. This weekend BP are working to switch the oil spill containment system to one designed to capture the entire flow. Success should boost the stock of course, but failure won't be such a big deal to the downside providing the back-up plan to re-install an improved version of the present cap can be implemented if the best option can't.

The news flow on possible sales of BP assets is picking up. This Sunday morning there's a report that Exxon have Obaman go-ahead to look at BP assets and there's speculation of a takeover bid.

LONDON (Dow Jones)--Oil major BP PLC Sunday declined to comment on a report in a U.K. newspaper that Exxon was mulling a takeover bid for the company.

A spokesman for BP also declined to comment on a U.K. press report that BP was in talks with the U.S.'s Apache Corp. to sell up to $12 billion in assets including a big stake in Alaska's Prudhoe Bay oil field.

"We have no comment to make on market rumors and speculation," a BP spokesman told Dow Jones Newswires.

The U.K.'s Sunday Times said that Exxon had sought clearance from Washington DC to examine a takeover bid for BP.

The newspaper cited oil industry sources as saying the Obama administration had told Exxon and one other U.S. oil company, thought to be Chevron, that it would not stand in the way of a deal that could value BP at up to GBP100 billion.

The sources said there was no certainty that Exxon would make a move, but said talks with Washington indicated a renewed interest as BP came closer to plugging its oil well in the Gulf of Mexico.

"There have been talks at a high level, and Exxon has expressed a serious interest. It is too early to talk about a bid yet, but they are clearing the way," a senior oil industry source told the Sunday Times.

1. Americanizing the assets might play well across a lot of the US political spectrum, tho of course Exxon is a bête noire to the moonbats, especially this administration.

2. Exxon is a disciplined outfit and would provide more credible operational assurances than BP can.

3. A US bidder might be able to do a deal with Obama to cap the practically unlimited damages that might be levied upon a finding of criminal negligence. Such a damages' cap is essential for a takeover bid. Obama could argue that granting a cap is the way forward to get drilling re-started in the Gulf. The masochistic moratorium on deepwater drilling is a legal and electoral embarrassment that Obama could do without if he has any sense. (I know, I know).

That said, the politics of a US bid for BP would play badly in the UK, albeit that Americans own as much of the company as Britons and albeit that the company may shortly have an American CEO. Some other time, sure, but not now when BP is performing heroically in some ways against a backdrop of thuggery and incompetence from Obama, Justice, Energy and Congress. Now...no way, says this Briton. The US Feds are at least as culpable as BP from start to finish in all of this, but BP's taken the heat, the shame and the threats. A US takeover in those circumstances would be infuriating and would damage US/UK relations for a long time. Of course to Obama that's not a bug but a feature.

No, were I Exxon I'd look for a deal to take over BP's US upstream assets. There are 2 parts to that deal; price - it won't be cheap, but it won't be expensive given the strategic potential of the acreage (after all the US won't always be a banana republic) and the spoken or unspoken leverage of federal threats to shut down BP's US business (today the US is a banana republic). The second part to a deal is an arrangement with the US encompassing say $10-$20 billion to Obaman preferred entities like solar power companies and wind farms with political connections plus a workable policy on deepwater drilling.

Now if I were Shell, I'd talk to the Feds about bidding on BP assets, or bidding on BP, as soon as a full containment system is in place. Shell should be acceptable in the US, isn't quite as demonized as Exxon and would be much more acceptable in the UK and Europe. The biggest problem may be that there's nobody in Obamaworld with business savvy to talk to. He should draft his ally, Warren Buffet, to represent the US interest - the whole US interest.

Anyway, this weekend may boost BP stock ($34). Hope so. My sell target is $45, but I might be tempted in again if it dips from there. A feeding frenzy could develop.

Update 1: An ex-colleague who now works in BP read this then wrote to me:

It's been painful to see the biased reporting; I have been at Unified Command in louisiana for most of the time and see all the great things we are doing to response and the huge effort we are making to be transparent. Really lost faith in the popular press.

Update 2: The stock was boosted and closed 8% up today, Monday.

One of the things I find darkly amusing, are lefties talking about the rich 'paying their fair share'. It's like they are blind in one eye and deaf in one ear, or having a coin with only one face. Who talks about benefits without contemplating costs, or vice versa?

Well, you know, not very 'smart' people.

Yet its even worse than that, because where the left has actual power, the rich still don't pay taxes, in fact, more often than not, they get massive subsidies from long-suffering tax-payers.

The inescapable truth is that the middle-class pays the taxes--always have and always will, which means of course that Barack Hussein Obama is lying right to your face when he promises middle-class tax cuts, stimulus targeted and the middle class, and tax hikes 'for the rich'. Its bull, and its not even original bull. Socialists have been running on the same rhetoric for decades in every western country in the world.

Case in point. Google, Inc., whose political contributions were divided 75% for Democrats and 25% for Republicans, had an effective tax rate of 2.4%, actually saving over 3 billion dollars last year. This in spite of the fact that the U.S. corporate rate is a whopping 35% and the UK, its other significant market, has a 28% rate.

Illegal and immoral machinations? Hardly.

Income shifting commonly begins when companies like Google sell or license the foreign rights to intellectual property developed in the U.S. to a subsidiary in a low-tax country. That means foreign profits based on the technology get attributed to the offshore unit, not the parent. Under U.S. tax rules, subsidiaries must pay “arm’s length” prices for the rights -- or the amount an unrelated company would.

Because the payments contribute to taxable income, the parent company has an incentive to set them as low as possible. Cutting the foreign subsidiary’s expenses effectively shifts profits overseas.

After three years of negotiations, Google received approval from the IRS in 2006 for its transfer pricing arrangement, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The IRS gave its consent in a secret pact known as an advanced pricing agreement. Google wouldn’t discuss the price set under the arrangement, which licensed the rights to its search and advertising technology and other intangible property for Europe, the Middle East and Africa to a unit called Google Ireland Holdings, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Kind of hard to be a tax cheat with the approval of the IRS, isn't it?

The article is pretty interesting, but setting aside all the comments about how companies like Google, Microsoft and Facebook aren't paying enough in taxes, the reality is that the government is collaborating with these companies to reduce their taxes, and you don't get that kind of break without a damn good reason.

You just hope the reason isn't to line the pockets of a political party at the expense of the middle class, but as the last decade has taught us, we all have experienced a failure of imagination of what kind of depravity Washington can sink to.