This is Totally Your Father’s Oldsmobile
They’re digging mass graves behind the Renaissance Center:
It’s not that people are leaving GM. It’s how they leave. Two weeks ago, Opel chief Karl-Friedrich Stracke presented numbers to Dan Akerson. Akerson fires him. Opel gets two interim chiefs in a week. Last Thursday, Opel’s new design chief Dave Lyon doesn’t even start his job. Today, media in the U.S. and Germany report that Lyon had been escorted from the building and to a waiting car by GM’s head of personnel. A day later, global marketing chief Joel Ewanick suddenly leaves. Instead of wishing him all the best for his future endeavors, GM spokesman Greg Martin puts a knife in Ewanick’s back: “He failed to meet the expectations the company has of an employee.”
Read the whole thing. I’m betting there’s going to be a Hitler’s Bunker video on YouTube covering the Second Fall of GM — and it might not be too long from now.
I think that their entire business model boils down to one mission: Don’t implode before the election. The panic setting in is not that GM is going to fail as a business, but that GM is going to fail at this one mission.
Well they had to fill all those empty lots in Detroit somehow. Just didn’t realize mass graves was an option on the table.
They’re both in free fall, but who hits ground and goes splat first, Detroit or California?
Detroit has a head start, but California is bone-headedly resistant to change.
Tough call.
Anyone who is surprised at what is going on in GM has not been paying attention.
The facts are simple : Bailouts REWARD failure and punish success. GM is a failed company and CANNOT be saved, it WILL go bankrupt again and again and again until it cannot be bailed out anymore and is left to die.
The Tyler Durdens over at Zero Hedge have been painstakingly documenting the two-year charade of the GM “turnaround” from day one. Channel stuffing, shell games with employees and supply chains, counting cars shipped as cars sold, dealer lots full of product they can’t sell, and now GM execs being fired by the dozens now that Opel knows what a disaster they have on their hands.
I don’t want to see GM go under. It’s going to take hundreds of thousands of jobs with it when it implodes. But there’s no choice now. The company has to go, and it has to fail before the election or we’ll get Obamee for another four years and I guarantee you that will lead to tens of millions of lost jobs and open civil war.
“or we’ll get Obamee for another four years and I guarantee you that will lead to tens of millions of lost jobs and open civil war.”
So if we don’t get Obama for another four years, the parties to the imminent “open civil war” will just fade away? Where will they go? What will convince them that they were wrong? Romney?
Please, get a new meme. “Romney is no different from Obama” is just so tired.
That’s not my meme. Romney is totally different than Obama. He will turn the government in a totally different direction. But the government is only part of the problem. I keep remembering a comment about Obama’s 2008 election that I think was attributed to someone from Eastern Europe (maybe Poland) about how the most important thing about Obama’s election was what it told the world about the American electorate — how they could be hoodwinked.
Mittens has dealt with failing companies before. He’s got some sense as to which to save, which to break into pieces and which to plow under. The Whine is a Marxist in world view who governs as a fascist, he’s got no idea about the free market. Mittens wasn’t my first or second or third choice, but he’s at least a competent capitalist.
Cars are being built better these days, lasting longer. We don’t need the capacity to turn over the whole fleet every three years any more. What’s going to suck is who gets left holding the bag for all those pensions (which probably are going to get a haircut)
Best scenario for GM, long term:
Company goes Chapter 7. A private equity Bain-like firm steps in and picks up the pieces.
Chevy and Cadillac soldier on as New GM Lite or somesuch. Perhaps Opel and Holden get thrown into that mix as well. Buick gets sold to Chinese investors; it is already the biggest car brand on the Mainland. Everything else goes to the crusher.
This is what should have been done 3 years ago. Perhaps a professional turnaround Chief Executive is the only one who will enable this to happen at all.
Three years ago, a GM insider predicted that when it was all over,
nothing would be left but Chevrolet and Cadillac.
Gee, yesterday we learned from Richard Miniter’s forthcoming book that Obama needed four tries before Valerie Jarret would let him make the “gutsy call” to attack Bin Laden and that the real force behind Obamacare was Pelosi. Today, the GM that BO “saved” appears to about to become unsaved. Gosh, Obama’s “accomplishments” are dropping like dead Chicago Democrat flies. If this keeps up, he’ll need a smaller postage stamp for his resume.