Word: plan
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Borrowing heavily from features of the failed House and Senate plans, the Treasury plan requires that labor costs be on par with those of the nonunionized automakers but gives the companies until the end of 2009. It eliminates the job bank and requires that half of the future payments to the retiree health-care trust, VEBA, be made with stock. Further, it requires that debt be cut by two-thirds through a debt-for-equity exchange. Though these are terms of the loan, they are described as "targets," meaning exceptions can be made if there is deemed...
...plan will move $13.4 billion in funds from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) to GM and Chrysler, with GM getting $9.4 billion and Chrysler $4 billion. The money will be in the form of three-year loans, but the terms permit the Obama Administration to demand earlier repayment - presumably triggering bankruptcy - if it believes the restructuring goals are not being met. The near-term target is a March 31 deadline for the automakers to show a plan for achieving long-term viability. Based on White House and Treasury descriptions of the plan, this will be less an acid test...
There is another story in all this, of course. President Bush is approaching Hoover-Buchanan levels of end-of-office ignominy. His evident discomfort at unveiling the auto plan Friday morning comes, in part, from the ideological anomie he feels at the massive government intervention in a once major part of the American economy. But what must hurt even more for Bush - who has always had a keen sense of political reality, whatever his other shortcomings - is the self-image of a President stepping before the podium in his last days to announce a stopgap rescue for two giant, collapsing...
...Friday morning, though, GM chairman Rick Wagoner, was already envisioning a brighter future. "In many ways our restructuring plan [with the government] accelerates and expands the transformation that we've been driving in North America for the past several years. It's really a blueprint for a new General Motors - one for our next 100 years," he said...
Though Ford is not receiving any of the $13.4 billion TARP funds, President and CEO Alan Mulally also expressed gratitude. Mulally also reiterated Ford's intent to stick to the plan it recently submitted to Congress, calling for the company to return to pre-tax profitability by 2011. That plan includes introducing more fuel-efficient vehicles - including a broader range of hybrid-electric vehicles. This week, Ford said it is doubling the output of hybrid vehicles in 2009. (See pictures of the remains of Detroit...