Friday, May 29, 2009

Bankruptcy Looms for G.M.

Bankruptcy could come as early as Monday for G.M. Michael J. de la Merced and Micheline Maynard of The New York Times report:

Early Thursday, G.M. proposed a deal in which bondholders would receive up to a 25 percent stake — a bigger share than G.M. offered the autoworkers union — if they do not oppose its bankruptcy reorganization, and then said that a group representing many of the largest bondholders had accepted the offer.

The proposal came as administration officials and G.M. began to discuss how the carmaker would look once it emerged from a court reorganization. The company is expected to seek bankruptcy protection by Monday, the deadline set by the Obama administration to restructure outside bankruptcy.



2 comments:

  1. I'm guessing I'm not alone in bouncing between two poles on this. On the one hand, there's logic, reason and an understanding of the horror a GM collapse could well bring.

    On the other, there's the schadenfreude of watching the company that destroyed Flint and Detroit feeling the pain of failure ... very public and deeply humiliating.

    My father warned of this many years ago when he said that an end would come when "the car guys" no longer ran car companies. He didn't live long enough to see with his own eyes a Buick-less Flint. In some ways, I'm glad. He was a Harlow Curtice-Harley Earl guy.

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  2. I don't feel any schadenfreude regarding GM. I'm them. They're me.

    I've never worked for them. A few uncles did, and some friends, but that's it. But Flint and GM are cousins. Whatever big managerial and labor-relations and design/marketing mistakes were made over the years, I see them and us as *family*.

    Wall Street money guys and Washington "experts"...those guys I would enjoy seeing humbled...but it doesn't seem to be happening. They screw up BIG time, we get dumped on. I don't like that at all.

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Thanks for commenting. I moderate comments, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. You might enjoy my book about Flint called "Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City," a Michigan Notable Book for 2014 and a finalist for the 33rd Annual Northern California Book Award for Creative NonFiction. Filmmaker Michael Moore described Teardown as "a brilliant chronicle of the Mad Maxization of a once-great American city." More information about Teardown is available at www.teardownbook.com.