GM Planning To Lay Off Thousands, May Dump Top Brands

And they've already decided to ditch the Hummer brand. Oh my.

A billion dollar bandaid on a 300 billion dollar debt wound.

Laughable.

As someone who started driving during the first "gas crisis," I continue to laugh at the whole SUV fad.

We need a Montgomery Burns smiley laughing gleefully as he thinks about his investments doing well...

Not that I'm happy to see anyone loose their job, but white collar guys tend to do better when things like this happen. I'm glad to see GM making moves to return to profitablitiy. I might get a chance to pick up a few more shares before 2010 which might lower my buy-in prce a bit.

AlphaMan, how can GM return to proitability with their standing debt of 300 billion PLUS their pension liabilities?!

Try 200 billion, and keep in mind pensions have been relegated to the domain of the UAW now along with healthcare IIRC.

A company doesn't have to be debt free in order to be profitable, in fact, that'd be an anomaly rather than the norm.

GM's incredible debt has been the shackle keeping it down and your comment is that it's normal.

Get a fucking clue.

GM is one of the original Dow 30 companies and employs over 266,000 people. Right now, you can buy it at 1950's prices. To me, it's a no brainer. You can pass up this investment opportunity and miss the ride up, or you can believe that the company will not be competitive over the next decade or so. I think it will be and for only $1,000, it's not that big a risk for me.

Are you working on a degree in accounting and in finance? No? I didn't fucking think so, so shut your whore mouth. Look at some of the balance sheets for some of the other 30 Dow companies before opening your tripe hole. GM's debt is nothing unusual, General Electric has half a trillion dollars in debt. No, the unusual thing about General Motors is that it has -41 million dollars in equity.

Debt isn't a huge problem as long as the income to pay it off.

GM doesn't. To me that makes it a huge problem.

You know what, asshat? I fucking run a business. You're studying pie in the sky theory.

And here I just got called back to work too...

Do you have a degree in Accounting or in Finance?

Few things in the world are as annoying as a mere student behaving as if he's the master of his subject.

Congratulations, no one gives a shit.

Does it matter? I may not have completed my degree, but I still know leagues more about the subject than Poodle by virtue of the classes I've taken already.

That's the problem. That's why you're a failure in life--you don't have the brains to run a tic-tac-toe game, much less a business. What you need to do is run to a fucking business. There's not a person in the history of the universe more in need of a trip to a whorehouse than you are.

Yes.

1k buys you how many shares?

Roughly 100. It's about $10/share right now.

Well, few things are more annoying than a person who isn't even a student of the subject behaving as the master of it, something that is never in rare supply here.

A point of order: I'm not up for doing the research right now, but I suspect AT&T was another of the original Dow companies. After a couple decades of ineptitude and mismanagement they ceased to exist and their brand name was bought out by SBC. "The New AT&T" is not the venerable "Ma Bell" that has existed since the invention of the telephone.

Technically it is, or most of it.

Their brand name was bought out by SBC, but SBC was one of the baby bells, which in turn gobbled up a bunch of the other baby bells.

SBC = Southwestern Bell Corporation.

Also keep in mind that AT&T wasn't broken up by ineptitude or mismanagement, but rather by antitrust lawsuits.

No Nick, I'm talking after the mandated breakup of the 1980s. I think I may have the details in a book at home. In the mean time, Wiki has the gist of what I'm talking about: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Telephone_&_Telegraph#Break_up.2C_spinoffs_and_restructuring

AT&T sunk a buttload of cash into trying to get into the computer business, even buying National Cash Register in 1991. They failed to break into the computer market and lost a ton of money there before divesting.

A few years later, they sank billions into getting into the cell phone industry. Ten years later they divested themselves from that, again losing a bunch of money.

Next they decided they were going to get into cable and broadband Internet. Getting into that little adventure set them back some $54 billion and they eventually exited that market a few years later.

About the time they sold off their broadband network they invested heavily into Voice Over IP. Of course if you really want to be a player in VOIP, you have a definite advantage if you, you know, have a broadband network you can offer bundling with. Too bad they had just sold off said broadband network. So in the end, corporate giant AT&T wound up having their lunch eaten by the upstart Vonage, and three years ago, they got bought out, as you've pointed out, by one of the "baby Bells" that was divested over two decades ago.

AT&T was a huge, monolithic American institution, that had been around for over a century. It was too big to fail and a bulwark of our economy. Of course after squandering hundreds of billions with mismanagement and inability to adapt to new times, it ceased to exist in the form we were familiar with. Sounds a bit like GM in some ways, no?

Not really, because GM hasn't been divided up by antitrust lawsuits, hasn't spread into other businesses.

The only thing they have in common is a monolithic bureaucracy and a poor track record since 1980.

I'm not sure why we're even arguing here, everyone here agrees that GM needs to shed its bureaucracy and trim its marquees.

Where/how do I go about buying GM stock? At $10 a share I could get in on that action.

Get a discount broker... TD Ameritrade or Scottrade. You might want to do some researching first. $1000 seems like very little to me to own 100 sharers if a Dow 30, but I go in with the knowledge that it might depreciate a bit more in the meantime. I think I'm going to keep this an make it one of my core investments over the next 20-30 years. I'm not looking for a fast buck here...


With that said, you might want to get a full service broker if this is your first dabble in the stock market. Of course they will tell you to stay clear of GM right now. I've been in it for over a decade so I have the confidence and where-with-all to tell them "fuck you, buy the stock." In my experience, when companies likie GM go south like this and institutional investors are fleeing from it, it's time to buy as they've already sold out. The pressure is on the board of directors and management to turn this company around.


They really should not have discontinued the electric car they had a decade ago.

GM will get a federal bailout. Count on it. Rumor has it that they're pushing development on the Volt so heavily in order to be in a better bargaining position when it comes time for the bailout. GMs also a major player in the defense industry, and no President is going to want to have their opponent say that they cost this country over 200K jobs. (I forget the exact number, but every GM worker supports the jobs of several other non-GM workers, so if they go tits up, lots of other people will go tits up as well.)

The federal government can afford to bail out GM?

Wouldn't GM be better off dumping their lessor brands, rather than their top brands?!?

Over $10.15/share?

Dude, I'm in this for the long haul... On the strength of the company's history, I've dipped a toe in to see if the water's OK.