GM Stock Tanks: How the Mighty Hath Fallen

June 24th, 2008 9:28 PM

In the latest GM Death Watch, RF points out that GM is dancing on the point of a spear. The LA Times puts it into a different perspective. After the stock market closed yesterday with GM down 6.4 percent from Friday's closing, the company that was once the largest and most profitable in the world is "now is a less-significant business than Starbucks Corp., Gap Inc. or computer game retailer GameStop Corp." GM's total market capitalization is currently $7.3b, down from $14.1b on January 1. Starbucks, on the other hand, "still has two digits before the decimal point: Starbucks' shares are worth $11.9 billion in all." And as if to rub salt into wounds, they point out "you could fit nearly 17 GM's in Coca-Cola's $124-billion market cap." How the GM board can sit idly by and watch this unfold is anyone's guess, and why they keep the current impotent leadership around defies logic. GM's workers, suppliers, dealers, stockholders and customers deserve better than this.

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Mikey on Jun 24, 2008

mfgreen40:Yeah your right in hindsight they should have clipped our wings years ago.But they didn't management was too greedy themselves. Hey they should have shoved the big profits from trucks into small car development.Instead they lined thier pockets.Now we pay the price.

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Ihatetrees on Jun 24, 2008

mikey: I guess technically the strikes in 1996 were not illegal. But there were costly shutdowns... http://www.nytimes.com/specials/downsize/gm-strike.html Google "uaw strikes 1996" for more news stories...

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Mfgreen40 on Jun 24, 2008

Mikey I have a lot of respect for you and I agree,managment failed big time.

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Rudiger on Jun 24, 2008
jaje: "The tipping point will be cutting out the dividend entirely - the legacy GM shareholders will no longer allow their dwindling investments to not reward them for their ignorant support of Red Ink Rick and Bozo Bob. Until then it’s business as usual rearranging the deck chairs on SS GM."Yeah, losing that dividend is really the key to waking GM up to their dire situation. Roger Smith was quite proud of the fact that the dividend was paid every year during his disasterous 10-year tenure at the helm of GM. It didn't matter to him the market share that GM had lost during the same period. So long as the primary emphasis is placed on paying that miserable dividend (which is exactly the mindset of all the finance guys running the show at GM), until it's gone, nothing is really going to change about the way GM operates.

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