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Originally Posted by talwell
I am very proud of GM - most people were very against them getting the government loan but did not take the time to think of the affects that it would have it they did not get it. Not only would the US have lost one of its most valuable companies and possibly the industry as a whole, but also millions of people would have lost thier jobs. Not only this, but if the US Government would have allowed GM to close the amount of tax revenues that would have been lost would have easily out weighed the amount of money they lent them.
Way to go GM - I think you are on the right path. I will admit that I think that GM did sway from the path of high quality cars and innovative designs but I am glad to see they are finding their way back to the top of the industry.
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You make the assumption that GM as a whole would have collapsed and that is the rhetoric that was initially used to try and scare folks and gain support for "bailing them out". The reality is, a structured bankruptcy without government purse-string-pulling would have allowed GM to come out the other side leaner and meaner. While there would definitely have been displaced labor in the near term the long term stability would have had a much better opportunity to establish itself and ensure longer term employment for many more people. It is called a business cycle, it weeds out failure.
With the government having gotten involved, what has REALLY been fixed I have to ask. Smoke and mirror ads and "hey we're back" rhetoric don't mean shat. What is it that has changed, how is the GM/Union relationship different, have the government regulations (C.A.F.E.) standards been changed to loosen the iron-fisted grip the Feds have around the collective automakers throats. Seems to be from a business perspective, other than killing a few brands, it is business as usual so all that has really been done is delaying the inevitable collapse but since the precedent has been set they'll just be bailed out again, and don't dismiss the notion for a second that if GM were down south in a right-to-work State they wouldn't have been left alone to dither on the vine.
I will agree that GM is definitely on the right path with their products, it just has to play out whether their business practices will allow their products to survive.
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Originally Posted by The_Blur
 GM paid the loans. The rest is up to the IPO and the government. The government can get rid of its stock at its own discretion. GM has no say in this. At this time, GM has exceeded its obligations by paying a loan with interest early. That's not only impressive but respectable and demonstrative of the company's success. |
When you use borrowed money to pay back borrowed money, you didn't really accomplish anything, it really just means you borrowed, or in this case, accepted, more than you REALLY needed which in and of itself can be viewed as a positive. If their annual earnings statement would come out to say they woulda had a 10 billion dollar profit but they used 8 billion of it to pay back a portion of their loan then I would be more encouraged but when you move numbers from one line on the ledger to another you really didn't accomplish anything. I can borrow 5G from my Visa card to pay off the 5G on my MasterCard, did I really accomplish anything?
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Originally Posted by Dragoneye
If only it were that easy. The labor costs were not a cause but an effect of the same reason that brought GM down....this thing snowballed out of control starting in the 70s. Nailing any one group/person/thing down for it would be inaccurate.
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I'm going to have to second Dragoneye here in saying the blame cannot solely rest on any one group's shoulders. Do I disagree that things like parking cars that roll off the line in a large lot or torquing three bolts into door hinges for each car that comes past you is worthy of roughly $75/hr in total benefits, I absolutely disagree with that. But if management sitting on the other side of that contract is willing to sign it, then they're jackasses for doing so and another hand that held the pen to put the writing on the wall for what has played out over time.
Couple those two entities at two ends of a rope and you get a very difficult and unsustainable economic model, add to that the government shaking the rope along the way with C.A.F.E. (which are BS and have done nothing to significantly reduce consumption and wind up contributing to more deaths since people are driving around in tin-cans), corporate taxation (which is just passed along to us as the consumer), and their choke-hold on fossil fuel energy production that jacks up gasoline prices and you have a recipe for what has transpired.
You see what happens when an automaker has the opportunity to build the car it wants to build because it knows it is a car the market wants, you get a Camaro that hands its rivals their arses in sales and in today's eco-marxist-tree-hugging-3$-a-gallon-for-premium world still manages to sell by a significant percentage the V8 beast of the bunch.