Word: plan
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...that's if things go according to plan. Holders of $27 billion in GM bonds have refused the company's debt-for-equity swap, making bankruptcy all but inevitable. For purist capitalists, the lasting significance of GM's pending Chapter 11 (and Chrysler's bankruptcy, filed a month ago) is the overwhelming intrusion into the private sector by Barack Obama and his auto task force at Treasury. "The day they fired the CEO of General Motors" - Rick Wagoner was dismissed by task-force co-chairman Steve Rattner in late March - "is a day we will look back on with great...
...March 26, Obama convened the task force in the Roosevelt Room. By then, as Rattner explained to the President, a commercially sound plan for a stand-alone Chrysler was out of the question; it was deeply in debt, bleeding money and saddled with unpopular products. Of the 20 best-selling vehicles in the U.S. in 2008, only one, the Dodge Ram pickup, was made by Chrysler - compared with five for GM and four for Ford. A venerable European carmaker, Daimler, had already tried and failed to revive Chrysler. Its current owner, the private-equity fund Cerberus, had spent months...
...German government-backed credit for Opel of €1.5 billion ($2.1 billion). But German officials said the U.S. surprised them on Wednesday with a new demand for an additional short-term credit of €300 million ($416 million). The U.S. government also rejected the German government's plan to impose itself as a kind of administrator over Opel's management. After the meeting, the Germans blamed the Americans for the lack of progress. "Once again we were confronted with surprises, especially from GM," said Germany's Economics Minister, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg. (See pictures of Detroit's decline...
...Germany and the U.S. will renew efforts to thrash out a deal at a meeting set for Friday. But the clock is ticking. GM has until June 1 to present the U.S. government with a convincing restructuring plan, or it will be forced into insolvency. That would further complicate any effort to save GM's Opel and Vauxhall plants. (Read "Government Motors: Can a Reinvention Really Save...
...Austrian-Canadian Magna group and Italy's Fiat SpA remain the strongest bidders for Opel. Under pressure from trade unions and key leaders of German states where Opel operates, Berlin has appeared thus far to favor the plan presented by the Austrian billionaire Frank Stronach, whose Magna group is a major worldwide supplier of components to GM. Stronach has teamed up with Russian carmaker OAO GAZ Group and the state-controlled Russian financial group OAO Sberbank. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has been lobbying Merkel to support the Magna bid. Stronach told reporters on the sidelines of Wednesday's meeting...