davidfarmer

we'll see if it's as great as everybody says.........

BrianCunningham

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009...official-says/

xsiveone

If I took a gamble on GM common shares, I'd be selling about now.

0Robert@SPEEDSOUTH

Chrysler is privately owned by Cerebus. Now look at the timeframe of when they bought them, Chrysler wasn't in good shape after being dumped by DB, and was on the verge of going out of business then. What irritates me is that the Gov't is offering finc. aid to a group of private investors that knew that Chrysler was a crapshoot when they bought it. There is no doubt that tax payers are "covering" the costs of a lot of stupid and risky decisions made over the past few years, but this one really gets me. You have to wonder if this type of scenario was possibly in their business plan to start with?

0Randy@DRM

Here is a my simple example of the situation.

Lets say I walked into the bank

I make 1 million a year
I spend 1.8 million a year
But I would like to buy a new machine that cost .5 million
this machine will lose .2 million a year and has been for the past 10 years
Here is one more kicker
Next year I only plan on taking in .75 million

My banker would throw the idea in the trash and close my accounts....
But then if I told him I have a money printer in my basement, he would kick my azz.

The I is a sybol of the biggest most wastefull corp in the world (USA government)
2+2=4 in the normal world
593464627579123752345 X 159723489572349 = Time to print more money

But some how the powers to be make the numbers add up to a win on election day.

Randy

Z11409

Cerberus owns 51% of GMAC also.

xsiveone

I don't think that they care about Chrysler. What I think that they care about is that the house of cards doesn't fall. If one auto company goes, suppliers may fall by the wayside and this in turn may bring down GM and even Ford with it. This may even have an affect on the foreign manufacturers that build cars in this country.

Good point. GMAC is a financial and with the financial system being fragile...

John Shiels

No one in the automotive business was prepared for what happen in the auto industry world wide. I think GM and Chrysler would have made it on their own if the market didn't collapse so fast. You went from 17 million to 10 million cars a year in real short order in the USA. Chrysler and GM have been caught by thier high profit truck / SUV sales collapsing because of many businesses not buying new trucks. That is a big part about of why GM is down 49% compared to the industry average of being down about 39%.

They were not stupid because most every other auto company was trying to take part of the high profit truck and SUV market share.

Chrysler was going to be making the new pickup for Nissan.

John Shiels

Toyota is terrified what could happen to the supply chain in this country. Japan has way over 300 parts supplers in this country making parts. They could be stuck in real short order also.

How many parts can you be missing when you are assembling a car as it comes down the line? Chrysler shut a plant because of parts suppy problems.

0Robert@SPEEDSOUTH

I know this is going to sounds nuts, but several years ago we were noticing that SO many of our best customers were in the construction industry, whether they were builders or owned contracting companies, we were realizing that the common denominator with this group was home building and so I talked to several of them that had become good friends about what they thought was a good way to touch this market and many mentioned that the local home builders association may be a good way to get our name out there , so I thought, well, we'll give this a try, so I called the local assoc. to see what it would take for SPEEDSOUTH to join the Greater Birmingham Association of Homebuilders, and of course, the first thing the lady tried to figure out was why on earth an Automobile Performance Business would want to join the assoc. I told her what we were seeing, etc., and a few letters later, we were in. SPEEDSOUTH was a member of the GBAHB. So my wife and I got all dressed up for our first dinner meeting with them, it was a welcoming meeting for the new members and the guest speaker was a financial economist and his presentation was about the future decline of the homebuilding market, I remember saying to my wife, this isn’t good, this was Fall of 2005. Obviously, nobody realized how bad it would be, but interestingly we started to see the signs pretty quickly. We’ve always done a good bit with turbo diesels, a lot of people use them to tow their race trailers, and most of the homebuilding guys drove them every day so we were all the time hopping up their brand new diesels, many of them would buy a new one every year and we continued seeing these guys, but now their trucks were 2 years old, think about it, if a lot of customers are bringing their new trucks to you EVERY year and then they decide to keep them 2 years instead, you notice. A lot of these guys were still playing with cars in a big way, but evidently they were realizing that buying a new truck wasn’t necessarily the smartest move at the moment even if it could be expensed that year, maybe they didn’t need to expense anything.

It makes sense now, that because we are in a “luxury” business we probably would see a slow down first, and by the time 2007 rolled around, the world was already changing in a big way, the BIG 3 were already becoming news and the one that was the most shaky at that time, and one that was starting the talks of possibly needing some sort of government loan was Chrysler, the writing was on the wall that DB was going to dump them at any moment, and then the next news you hear, a “Private Equity Firm”, Cerebus, stepped in and saved them. Now, a business that was founded only 15 years ago just bought a huge American car company, and not just any car company, one that DID receive over a billion dollars in government backed funds nearly 30 years ago. DID is the important part of that, because it doesn’t just show that they might be able to do it, they can, and they have.

Do some reading on the truth behind the Gov’t backed loans to Chrysler back then, it’s the same lines we’re hearing now, too big to allow to fail, too many jobs at stake, suppliers will suffer or fail, etc….So your Cerebus, it would only be just that much more disastrous now, right?

Sounds like a win, win for Cerebus to me.

I said it then, and I’m saying it now, it was part of their business model from the get go.

0Randy@DRM

This will make you a little sick to your stomach.
http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/cli...ment&year=2008

Funny what 10-20 million dollar invested can buy you these days

Randy