Strange article. The body of the article talks about cost cutting, and new union contracts, and GMAC's losses from playing in the sub prime mortgage market. Thousand of hourly job cuts,buyouts, and early retirements will realize billions of dollars of saving by 2011. The GM suits think they can cost cut the company back to profitability. Good luck Rick Wagoner.
There is a scary graph at the top of the piece, plotting GM profit or loss from 2007 back to 2000. From 2000 to 2006 the bar chart bumps up and down by a few billion a year. Make a few billion one year, loose a few billion next year. For 2007, the bar drops thru the floor with a $40 billion loss. That deep black hole was invented by GM's accountants last fall when they took $37 billion worth of "tax credits" off GM's books. A 40 billion loss in a company with a market capitalization of only $13 billion is not real accounting, it's play acting. Real companies cannot loose three times their net worth in only one year. In short this "loss" actually amounted to taking imaginary assets off the books. I'm sure the books looked a lot better in the year those imaginary assets were put on the books. In short the $40 billion loss is a correction of years of accounting jiggery pokery. Harsher critics might call it accounting fraud.
Not a single word about the new Chevy Malibu and the new Caddy CTS. The only thing that will make GM profitable ever again is good new cars that sell. Why didn't the GM people talk these cars up with the Wall St Journal people? Are GM's suits so removed from the car business that they never think about what they make? Or do the suits know these two expensively created new cars aren't going to sell? What kind of a car guy doesn't talk about new car designs? Or is it that the GM suits aren't car guys but mere bean counters?
Sell you GM stock ASAP, the General is doomed.
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