Been a hell of a weekend for the auto industry.
For those not following, the CEO of GM (Rick Wagoner) is asked to resign by the Obama administration, and does so. Chrysler has 30 days to find a buyer (for itself, that is) and GM has 60 days to produce a restructuring that the administration thinks might actually work.
Batten down the hatches, folks, it’s going to be a wild month or two.
Agreed.
of course, my boss pointed out something interesting.
If GM goes under, then a generation of retirees will be without health care. If that happens what are the chances that a National Health care plan will be pushed through PDQ???
I heard about it this morning. Yikes. Hang in there.
/wince
Ouch.
Yeah, my father for one. What a lovely way to penalize the people that are past their ability to do anything about the situation.
I was kind of amused that Wagoner resigned yesterday, as my friend Mari and I had been discussing just that earlier in the day. We thought it odd how none of the current CEOs resigned, and were quite resistant to taking any sort of concessions for themselves for government aid (unlike say, Iacocca.)
Weird timing. Even weirder couple of months.
*dies from the awesome in that icon*
thanks for the update. I am not really able to track stuff like this right now, but the few indicators I see (about economic recovery in general) are not good. :(
I’m confused, but I admittedly haven’t been paying enough attention to the news lately. I know that the federal government has bailed out GM (and also Chrysler I guess?), but doesn’t that mean that the government pretty much owns these companies now? So the government pretty much runs the auto industry? That’s kind of scary actually.
Mmm, just because they’ve gotten loans doesn’t mean they have a controlling interest in a literal sense, like stockholders do.