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Detroit, 9:36 AM
Mon Nov 30
14 posts in the last 24 hours
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11/19/09
11/19/09
11/19/09
11/19/09
91% of Americans find this annoying.
11/21/09
11/19/09
11/19/09
11/19/09
Kind of like when you couldn't make rent right after you finished college, and scared your parents into lending you $1,500. But you didn't tell them that you spent $400 of this on concert tickets and beer, and when you paid them back $200 early it was just so that they'd forget about the remainder.
11/20/09
#tips
11/19/09
11/19/09
11/19/09
I am also an opponent of special interest groups and their fuzzy stats (both liberal and conservative).
This leaves me with an ambiguous feeling.
11/19/09
11/19/09
I do know that if Obama DIDNT bail them out, they'd cut zillions of jobs and people would blame Obama for that instead.
The administration of the previous 8 years AND GM's senior staff seem to be held blameless for the current situation...
11/19/09
11/19/09
Just how slow does this ship turn?
11/19/09
#tips
11/19/09
Not at all, GM was still selling fine and would have been able to change production issues WITHOUT bankruptcy had the banks not failed, which YES was a political problem.
People like you seem to fail to remember it was the fact that GM had to use their profits to operate for months that caused GM to fail. They as well as every other American manufacturer couldn't get business loans to operate. Ford had enough profit to stave off bankruptcy, GM and Chrysler didnt.
The Japanese auto manufactures DIDNT have this issue, as they are all tied directly to a bank who continued to loan to them. Their issue is no one is buying cars because the banks that loaned money to normal people aren't lending now.
Did GMs practices lead to its faster rate of bankruptcy? You bet your ass it did. But politicians and bank executives where the ultimate backstabbers.
Your continued insistence that this was not the case just proves how little you know about what really happened a year ago, something the Republican party is insisting on and ecstatic about because they rely on stupid Americans to continue to remain in power.
Any TRUE republican would know flat out what I just said was what actually happened, because TRUE fiscal conservatives where just as fearful of the idea of banks being more than banks as the democrats were. Maybe for different reasons, but the underlying issue was the same, Banks should be in the business of being banks, nothing more.
11/19/09
#tips
11/19/09
The only reason Ford made it through was they had mortgaged literally everything (including the blue oval) just before the banks dried up. They did this actually because they (Mulally) knew they were BEHIND in their turnaround compared to GM and needed to be prepared for the worst. GM and Chrsyler both went for loans later and were shot down.....
Jim, the rest of your assesment is pretty spot on, and hilariously lost on all these internet CEO's a year later. You'd think the whole auto industry had been humming along as usual and GM just went belly up due to mismanagement reading most ignorant posts on here.
11/19/09
"Not at all, GM was still selling fine and would have been able to change production issues WITHOUT bankruptcy had the banks not failed, which YES was a political problem."
It was not politics or the bank's fault that GM had their back against the wall and could no longer sustain operation without assistance.
Selling fine? I seem to notice a continual slide in market share % even as the overall car market was growing in volume. GM could not hold it's percentage of the pie even when the pie was getting larger. Who's fault is that? The guy on the production line? Chase, BOA et. al.? It is still the fault of those that ran GM. And ran it into the ground.
At this point the damage has already been done, and I do hope they can right the ship, remove the yoke of the feds and move on independently.
11/19/09
GM at one point had 50% market share.....and basically 2 competitors.
Would your expectation be they still hold 50% today? This despite the 100's of competing nameplates out there? Let's be realistic, in a huge playing field of quality competitors this vast (most with various financial advantages) what is your expectation for market share? Outselling everyone else still isn't enough? Overall volume changes have little to no bearing (positive or negative) on market share, as it is a percent.
The problem lies in the legacy costs of being half the market, a very different market, and not slashing people/buildings/etc earlier (not that you could without bankruptcy).
There's fault to go around for sure. The guy on the line was just as greedy as top mgmt, and just as short sighted. Better, how about those bankers who gambled absurdly, ruined the market, and then quit doing what they do; lend. This killed the economy, killed the buyers ability to get financing for a vehicle, and killed GM's ability to get capital to weather the storm.
So, do you really think this is just poor mgmt, with no other circumstances?
11/19/09
The increase of other makes into the US market was not an event that occurred overnight or even in one decade. There was plenty of time to react before having to become wards of the state.
man⋅age⋅ment
Pronunciation [man-ij-muhnt]
–noun
1. the act or manner of managing; handling, direction, or control.
2. skill in managing; executive ability: great management and tact.
3. the person or persons controlling and directing the affairs of a business, institution, etc.: The store is under new management.
4. executives collectively, considered as a class (distinguished from labor ).
11/19/09
While mgmt has made plenty of mistakes, your ignoring of outside factors is flat out sad and ignorant, but not uncommon amongst "internet CEO's" aka know-it-alls.
11/19/09
Let's assume that the profit on the materials can outpace the facility overhead cost, and break it down to where all losses are associated with personnel, both labor and administration.
Let us furthermore assume that the taxpayer funded loan was a gift, and that none of it will come back.
Then, let us assume that the funds remained within North America.
With approximately 112,000 employees in North America, 8.6 billion dollars works out to $76,785 per worker that the taxpayers have spent.
Fire them all, and give me back my money. All $30 of it ($8.6 billion divided by the current US population of 300 million is only $28.67; The $1.33 is interest)
11/19/09
11/19/09
11/19/09
All I have to do is make rosier assumptions about the market and GM's ability to pay back its loans on time, and look farther into the future.
Without any justification of its (just as kooky) assumptions, this study is worthless. The only reason it exists is to rile up gullible teabaggers like CJinSD.
11/19/09
If the Fed charged GM 0% on those loans, they would still be getting an 18% return.
Aren't willfully ignorant statistics fun?
11/19/09
11/19/09
Of course one could adopt a more optimistic set of assumptions, developing a scenario in which this rescue turns out so successfully that most (but certainly not all) of the taxpayers' investment ultimately is returned, perhaps indeed with some profit. In that event, most of the taxpayer burden would disappear. But the plausibility of such rosy assumptions is not easy to defend. For starters, some $6.4 billion of the bailout funds, in the form of loans to the former (now bankrupt) GM and Chrysler, are not legal obligations of the newly-structured GM and Chrysler.[12] More importantly:
The GAO, which the Congress has directed to monitor closely all TARP funding, concluded in its October 2009 report that "whether the reorganized Chrysler and GM will achieve long-term financial viability remains unclear."[13]
Chrysler's prospects are in even greater doubt than GM's. Business Week in November 2009 reported that "even for an industry as troubled as this one, the numbers have been shockingly bad," questioning Chrysler's survival chances.[14] And from the December 2009 issue of Consumer Reports: "As for Chrysler, we couldn't recommend any of its products in last year's survey because of mediocre performance, poor reliability, or both."[15]
The head of the White House Auto Task Force, Steven Rattner, who managed the restructuring of Chrysler and GM, offered in November 2009 a highly guarded assessment of the firms' future prospects, concluding that whether Chrysler can recover depends on its uncertain prospects of meeting a need "to regenerate its product line and manage a significantly leveraged balance sheet," and as to GM, whether it "can implement the massive cultural change that is essential."[16]
According to the GAO, "Treasury's own analysis suggests that the circumstances necessary for the companies to reach market capitalizations high enough for Treasury to fully recover its equity investment are unlikely."[17] Put more bluntly, the U.S. government does not expect to recover the taxpayers' funds.
In sum, every new vehicle sold by GM and Chrysler now is accompanied by a substantial taxpayer subsidy, with little credible evidence that either firm will survive for long, barring further assistance in the future. If survival is only to the end of 2010, the taxpayer bailout burden could amount to some $10,700 per 2009-10 vehicle sold. Any earlier failures would increase this burden per vehicle sold, as would another grant to GMAC. For each year of survival beyond 2010, the burden per vehicle would decline – so long as no additional government funding is provided.
11/19/09
Why the hell did I go to college...
11/19/09
Just remember, even if the average is $60k, the higher salaries are skewing that figure, and the salaried employees generally have degrees, and without one, you'd have to have been there for 20 years to reach that level of compensation while working the line.
11/19/09
If you want to see a real waste of taxpayer dollars look at the groups that are writing these reports, it is these number pushing desk jockeys who are the real problem, not the hard working people building cars.
11/19/09
Also, faring, not fairing.
/grammarian
11/19/09
So there statement is correct in that, AT THIS TIME, taxpayers have paid that much for each vehicle. As more vehicles are made and GM pays the loan back that number will shrink.
If the study was done back when the Bailouts were first given, the numbers would probably be in the millions per car.
11/19/09
11/19/09
11/19/09