Departures 2008 Quotes

The nature of the present economic crisis illustrates very clearly the need for departures from unmitigated and unrestrained self-seeking in order to have a decent society. Even John McCain, the 2008 U.S. Republican presidential candidate, complained constantly in his campaign speeches of “the greed of Wall Street.” Smith had a diagnosis for this: he called promoters of excessive risk in search of profits “prodigals and projectors”—which, by the way, is quite a good description of many of the entrepreneurs of credit swaps insurances and subprime mortgages over the recent past.

Lucid Motors was started under the name Atieva (which stood for “advanced technologies in electric vehicle applications” and was pronounced “ah-tee-va”) in Mountain View in 2008 (or December 31, 2007, to be precise) by Bernard Tse, who was a vice president at Tesla before it launched the Roadster. Hong Kong–born Tse had studied engineering at the University of Illinois, where he met his wife, Grace. In the early 1980s, the couple had started a computer manufacturing company called Wyse, which at its peak in the early 1990s registered sales of more than $480 million a year. Tse joined Tesla’s board of directors in 2003 at the request of his close friend Martin Eberhard, the company’s original CEO, who sought Tse’s expertise in engineering, manufacturing, and supply chain. Tse would eventually step off the board to lead a division called the Tesla Energy Group. The group planned to make electric power trains for other manufacturers, who needed them for their electric car programs. Tse, who didn’t respond to my requests to be interviewed, left Tesla around the time of Eberhard’s departure and decided to start Atieva, his own electric car company. Atieva’s plan was to start by focusing on the power train, with the aim of eventually producing a car. The company pitched itself to investors as a power train supplier and won deals to power some city buses in China, through which it could further develop and improve its technology. Within a few years, the company had raised about $40 million, much of it from the Silicon Valley–based venture capital firm Venrock, and employed thirty people, mostly power train engineers, in the United States, as well as the same number of factory workers in Asia. By 2014, it was ready to start work on a sedan, which it planned to sell in the United States and China. That year, it raised about $200 million from Chinese investors, according to sources close to the company.

In the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, it seemed at first that Europe could dodge the blow that was hitting the United States. The unspoken reality was that in the 6 months after September 2008 European governments had to quietly spend 3 trillion dollars to bail out their troubled banks. In the case of the periphery countries, the main problem came from the abrupt departure of capital that up till then had been flowing in abundance to finance expansion plans. In the case of the strong countries’ banks, the travails came from their excessive exposure to sub-prime investments. The ensuing recession, plus the effort to rescue the banks, put several countries in a vulnerable situation. This was more apparent after the financial markets became jittery on discovering the magnitude of the Greek problem.

I was also facing a simultaneous and very serious stressor at work . . . In this section I recall briefly my departure from Westminster Theological Seminary in 2008. The focus of the “controversy” was the publication of Inspiration and Incarnation. The matter became quite public, landing me on the cover of the Philadelphia Inquirer (“Embattled Professor to Leave Seminary”) and attracting the attention of the local NPR station (resulting in a WHYY’s Radio Times interview with Marty Moss-Coane). Good times.