Generally Better Motors

GM is back, baby. We have the technology. The 50 Billion Dollar Man is out of surgery and ready to go...but there's bad news too.

GM now consists of four U.S. brands, has about $11 billion in U.S. debt and will be run by a smaller corps of executives, the Detroit-based company said today. It finished restructuring in 39 days, three days faster than Chrysler Group LLC.

The birth of the new automaker is a victory for President Barack Obama’s administration and Steven Rattner, the Treasury’s chief auto adviser, because the company was formed faster than the government predicted. GM was forced into Chapter 11 protection on June 1.

“This restructuring is a lot of what GM has been trying to look like for years now,” said Aaron Bragman, an analyst at IHS Global Insight Inc. in Troy, Michigan. “What bankruptcy has done is allowed them to sweep away a lot of undesirable things like debt and uncooperative labor contracts.”

Salaried employment will fall by 20 percent, GM said, and the number of U.S. executives will shrink by 35 percent to help meet Chief Executive Officer Fritz Henderson’s goal of shedding management layers to speed decision making.

The bad news is that tens of thosands of jobs will be lost, dealers will be axed along with tens of thousands more jobs, and the taxpayer still owns 60%+ of this mess. Also, I would be thinking that retraining laid off GM workers would be a stimulus priority, hint hint.

Obama needs to find a buyer for GM, or GM needs to pay the money back and repuchase the stock. It needs to happen soon, as in "within the end of the year, preferably". Nobody's really brought up the time frame of how long we own this company, and if it doesn't start really and truly making money and damn soon, it's going to be an engine block around Obama's neck.

In other words, if GM still stands for Government Motors by November 2012 or even 2010, the Dems are going to take some damage. That however depends on GM getting smaller cars out that people want like the Chevy Malibu and the Chevy Volt.

The article does go on to say that GM will be back as a publicly traded company next year. The sooner, the better. Good luck to them.