GM (GM) shares fell 5/8 to 68-5/16 in Tuesday afternoon trading.

$68.31 a share!!!

An interesting article I ran across…note the date.

I reckon we end the Death Watch when they die (Chapter 7) or recover.

Obviously, “recovery” is a tough thing to measure. But if we could see this train wreck before most, I guess we’ve got enough collective expertise to hazard a good guess when they’re “out of the woods.”

From my keyboard to God’s ears.

I mean, does GM DW series officially end on Bankruptcy Day? Or B-Day +1?

Or B-Hour? Will the bankruptcy story itself be the final one?!?

Good Riddance!

So buy them out of the healthcare benefits by a reverse auction. Return the pay rises they forewent in order to get the health packages, in effect.

Suppose their bargaining position at the time was

a)4% straight

b) 3% + moderate healthcare after retirment

or

c) 2% + exhorbitant healthcare.

All interested parties agreed on option c.

Why is it fair to punitively renegotiate that wage deal in retrospect? Would it not be just as ethical for GM to phone up purchasers of their cars over the last 10 years and tell them that they underpaid for their cars , please forward a check for $1000?

Sounds a bit dog in mangerish. The retirees negotiated for those healthcare payments as part of their reward package. The same retirees will probably be funding part of the rescue package JUST LIKE YOU. Yet you seek to retrospectively steal part of their remuneration.

Sure, from now on GM should (and presumably has) renegotiate pay and long term benefits, with current and future employees.

Bringing the Three Stooges into this discussion is really the highlight of my day. I needed the laugh.

And CaliCarGuy — I’m with toxicroach and Bunter1.
It should only be Chevy and Cadillac in the U.S. and figure out a way to prop up the Chinese Buick business with SAIC or one of the other companies. The rest would go to do-do land without anyone noticing.

Oddly the Vibe is the only “GM” product to make CR’s top reliability category in any of the last three years. Hmmm…isn’t that made by…

With a bit of luck, for the taxpayers, GM will have to file before Jan 20th.
THe world will not end and perhaps a tiny thread of sanity will prevail.

Bunter

Chevy, Cadillac. If the Chevy brand is good enough for the Vette and the Camaro, its good enough for everything Pontiac makes.

GM’s 14-member board includes four directors who also advise or sit on the boards of financial services firms that have received bailout funds: Erskine Bowles serves at Morgan Stanley, Armando Codina at Merrill Lynch, John Bryan at Goldman Sachs and E. Neville Isdell at SunTrust. … Mr. Codina also sits on GM’s compensation committee, as do Messrs. Bryan (the committee chair) and Bowles. All three sit on the compensation committees at their respective Wall Street firms as well

“Don’t worry, Rick. The government is dropping money from helicopters on anything with a balance sheet. Want an extra couple of million yourself? Here you go. Oh, about our fees…”

I’m sure that Rick & Co. know exactly what’s going on and have seen this coming for a long time. But given the immense personal pride invested (not to mention the immense paychecks involved), they couldn’t possibly admit that GM’s failure is due to their own failure.

Your initial point, that they already have 150 bil coming in every year and can’t make a go, is brilliant.

What in the name of a sniff of sanity makes anyone think 10-20 bil more in one shot will make any diff?

Case closed.

Bunter

Looked to my right (Republicans?) and saw an old construction job. It was plain and obvious that a bridge had been planned for the chasm, and that construction had essentially ended. Grass was growing between the slabs on the roadway which simply ended near the edge of the cliff.

Clearly, my subconscious either is thinking of the US auto industry or the world economy or both.

Equally clearly, in order to bridge this chasm, we have a LOT of work ahead of us.

I suspect that whatever “bridges” we build now will work out about as well as the real bridge which collapsed in Minneapolis a couple of years back. But that’s another story.

As for GM building what the public needs, well, they do. It’s just that they do it in South Korean, China, Germany, Hungary, Brazil, etc. instead of in Michigan, Ohio or Ontario. Instead, they have taken the easy way out and built what they damn well pleased then marketed the hell out of it (read: SUVs) to convince people they “needed” 5000 pound V8 on-frame truck based station wagons with all wheel drive to commute 5 or 10 miles and take the kids to soccer or t-ball. Because? Because, profits were $8000 per or better, since on-frame trucks were cheap to build, old engine designs were useable (tooling, dies, transfer lines and production lines of which had long been amortized – the Chevy V8 was introduced in the autumn of 1954, for gosh sakes). Now that the bubble has burst, both GM and the UAW (and also Chrysler) are totally screwed, glued and tatooed.

In the mean time the suits at GM more resemble this mental picture; cue Curley dressed in a high-dollar suit, saying “I’m a victim of
coicumstance!” “Nyuk nyuk nyuk.”

Time for the Republican congress to do a Larry and poke these stooges in the eyes.

There’s a football field of reasons why GM is at the edge of Niagra Falls in a boat with no oar. Credit contraction is not a fundamental reason. GM’s lack of highly desired products is.

Ironically enough, Mr. Martin, I’m ready to make a compelling case that the “worst financial crisis in generations” only accelerated your downfall. Your company was not making “real progress”, but instead were only doing things to delay the inevitable. But of course, the problems with your company has been said ad nausea that they almost lose meaning today. And the list is so long that several important factors would only be forgotten.

But if you think you have a compelling case to make, make it! Maybe people will actually believe it instead of rolling their eyes whenever GM blames others for their predicament.

Their only plan for survival is us(taxpayers) saving them. This company just needs to be liquidated and let someone more competent manage their resources, they can’t be saved with no real revolutionary plan.

Lack

of

Leadership

I’ve had to write serious engineering proposals for the disbursement of as litle as a few hundred K, and defend them before the board of directors of an electric utility. The least we can expect from GM is a professional business plan before handing them a check for $25,000,000,000. If they cannot even do that, then too bad, it’s goodbye.