The GM Fallout

I said on my radio show two weeks ago that the fallout from the GM bankruptcy was going to be worse than anyone expected. Between now and year end you will hear how GM's Chapter 11 took down the entire US economy. The old saying is "As goes GM so goes America" and it's as true today as it ever was.-Lou

Perils ahead in GM bankruptcy include liquidation, pension shortfall

Detroit News-We've got a new D-Day in the historic General Motors Corp. bankruptcy: If the automaker's good assets cannot be sold to a "New GM" by July 10, CEO Fritz Henderson told a bankruptcy judge in New York today, the company will be forced to begin liquidation proceedings.

Leave it to Henderson, nothing if not direct, to cut to the heart of GM's existential predicament. Is it yet another riff on the "shock-and-awe" strategy popularized last fall, which posited that a collapse of GM into bankruptcy or worse would prove cataclysmic for the national economy and, certainly, the Midwest. Yes, it is.

And, to a point, it's probably true -- emphasis on the "to a point" part. Team Obama may be intent on getting a speedy resolution to this silly little thing called the largest industrial bankruptcy in American history. And its Treasury Department has a penchant, at least in the Detroit Auto space, for setting tight deadlines and meeting them. But I'm not at all convinced the boss and his minions would let the General collapse into a heap of cut-rate auctions if the judge drags his feet.

Too much to lose. Too much political capital investment, even by the president. Too much danger to organized labor, the staying power of GM's pension fund and auto communities in the Heartland. Indeed, an emerging fear -- emerging, at least, in the public consciousness -- is the likelihood that GM is burning its pension fund on buy-outs and early retirements at a faster rate than anticipated, as the New York Times details in an important story story posted late today. The danger is that pension obligations will run ahead of GM's ability to pay them, meaning U.S. taxpayers would foot the difference through the entity known as the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp.

"GM basically raided the pension plan, by having a lot of these severance benefits paid through it," Douglas J. Elliott, a fellow with the Brookings Institution who specializes in financial institutions and policy, told The Times. Active workers "could find that they don’t get their full pensions when they retire, because the plan has had to be terminated because of the payments to current retirees. There are definitely these intergenerational transfer issues with underfunded pensions."