General Motors Death Watch 139: Money Talks

On Tuesday, the junk bond market sneezed and General Motors caught a cold. Less poetically, the money men behind the buyout of GM’s Allison transmission unit postponed a junk bond offering designed to pay for same. According to market sources, when the “spread” (the extra yield investors demand to compensate for their risk) widened by about 100 basis points, Merrill Lynch, Citigroup and Lehman Brothers pulled the plug. GM spokeswoman Renee Rashid-Merem said the company wasn’t worried about the sale: “The buyout remains on track.” Maybe so, but GM can’t afford this kind of setback. Literally.

GM is now deep into contract negotiations with the United Auto Workers (UAW). By all accounts, The General’s generals need some kind of “game changing” deal with the UAW. In other words, GM must take CEO Rick Wagoner’s well-established “pay off to f-off” union template to the next level. If, for example, GM wants to dump their health care liabilities into a UAW-run VEBA, it will require tens of billions its U.S. operations are still not generating.

It’s true: the chips are down. Without delving into the finer points of the fire raging through GM’s cash hoard, the automaker needs the $5.6b check from the Allison sale to finance its “turnaround.” Ipso facto. Whether or not The General’s advisors manage to off-load $3.1b in junk bonds to finance the Allison sale in a timely fashion, the fact that it’s happening at all tells us the company’s corporate masters are still mortgaging the farm to bet the farm on the farm. And the crops are still failing.

Confirmation came [again] on Monday, when we learned GM’s set to cut production of the vehicle Rick Wagoner hailed at launch as “the most important part of GM's strategy to turn our fortunes around.” GM’s Pontiac Production Center will soon be building 17 percent fewer Chevy Silverados.

More specifically, GM is reducing Pontiac’s pickup production by 3060 vehicles per month or 36,720 per year. If you [conservatively] figure GM clears $2k per truck, the move evaporates $73.4m in profit. And it still might not be enough; Silverado sales dipped 23.5 percent in June. Another month like that…

Is exactly what the financial whiz kids over at Barron’s are predicting. If so, by the time GM unveils its UAW window dressing in September, Wall Street’s confidence in the automaker’s prospects may be so low that another “historic union giveback” won’t make no never mind to the money men. The cost of GM’s borrowing, which is already onerous to the point of near-usury, will escalate even further, even faster. For a company already downing in a sea of debt, that’s not good.

What’s worse, GM’s faces a more general malaise in the leveraged loan and high-yield markets. Ironically enough (given GMAC’s role in the debacle), the sub-prime mortgage crisis has taken the sheen right off the sector. Cerberus is reportedly having problems financing its Chrysler takeover at the desired price. Despite Ford’s “surprise” results (attributable to asset sales and foreign ops), investor confidence in The Big 2.8 is fading. Same result: the cost of borrowing rises.

Brad Rubin, senior auto sector trading specialist for BNP Paribas, recently stated that “Investors know both Ford Motor Co. and GM are going to have to tap the debt markets at some point, and unfortunately it's at much wider levels than what they've done before.”

GM already rolls over tens of billions of dollars in debt each year. As Slate’s Daniel Gross pointed out way back in ’05, if GM borrows $30b and the rate it pays for new debt rises 1 percent, the company has to stump-up $300m in additional interest costs. “And since interest has to be paid first, higher interest costs mean less money for important things like executive compensation, investment in new plants, marketing, and developing hybrid engines.”

Fast forward three years and you can add financing union givebacks to the list. And update GM’s debt rating to Fitch Ratings’ “negative," despite dodging the Delphi bullet (by paying off the unions, ‘natch). While the media talks about GM's union-related health care burden, pegging the cost at $1800 per car, if The General returns to the Wall Street well in a big way, its vehicles could soon be shouldering half as much again in interest payments.

GM’s debt is a ticking time bomb; the fuse is well and truly lit. In terms of ridding itself of the UXB, nothing much has changed: GM can only eliminate its gigantic debt burden by selling hundreds of thousands of high margin vehicles in the United States.

Yes, well, in response to fading market share and continued over-production, GM has just amped-up its financial incentives on languishing metal (including leftover 2006 models). Meanwhile, Toyota’s going great guns. Its new entry into the full-sized pickup truck market has triggered the predicted incentives war in GM's most profitable segment, in a declining market.

As a TTAC commentator recently pointed-out, GM is now like communist Russia, with Toyota as America spending them into oblivion. For those who believe that GM can emerge from this crisis– or Chapter 11– fitter, better and stronger, the parallel is instructive.