Thursday, February 16, 2012

G.M.'s Record Profits

With only 7,000 G.M. employees left in the Flint area, this news doesn't have the same impact it would have once had, but it's still good to see a glimmer of hope for Michigan's economy.

Nick Bunkley of The New York Times reports:

General Motors reported the largest annual profit in its history on Thursday, even as losses in Europe dragged down fourth-quarter earnings.

G.M. said it earned a quarterly profit of $472 million, or 28 cents a share, down from $510 million, or 31 cents a share, a year ago. It was the eighth-consecutive quarterly profit for the carmaker, which cleansed much of its debt in bankruptcy years ago, but also the smallest during that stretch.

For all of 2011, G.M. earned $7.6 billion, nearly all of it from North America. That was 62 percent higher than the $4.7 billion it earned a year ago and more than G.M.’s previous record of $6.7 billion in 1997.



3 comments:

  1. Now to restart Pontiac and Saturn.

    ReplyDelete
  2. When you wash away all your debt and get millions from the government it's not hard to make a profit. Ask all the retirees and former stock holders how they like it!!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Right on, Jeff! Last year (2011), the old stock finally reached zero, and don't forget that you can deduct it on your taxes, assuming you were one of the ones that trusted and could never believe that they would actually take your money and make the stock worthless. At least then you can get something like a 15% credit. Since the government taketh away, ask your accountant if the government will now giveth back a portion!

    It's not the "one percent" that was hurt by this. Once again it was the middle class, who were in ESOP programs, and had faith that the old GM would recover.

    ReplyDelete

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.