Wednesday, November 7, 2007

Apropos of cars we can't ignore.

GM just posted the largest quarterly loss it its history: $39 billion. Or $433 million a day. Or $18.5 million an hour. Or $300,000 a minute.

As the late Everett Dirkson famously said, "sooner or later, you're talking real money."

“Things are bad and getting worse,” Peter Nesvold, an auto analyst with Bear Stearns, wrote to clients this morning, assuring them that the number was “not a typo.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/07/business/07cnd-auto.html?ref=business
I know I'm just a stupid creative guy, but with numbers like those, if I were GM, I'd think about blowing the whole thing up and doing something radically different. Not just another :30-second gag.

1 comment:

Tore Claesson said...

the numbers are so huge that i can't simply even understand how they are possible. i wonder how big the bonuses for the top brass are? Or their reverences when they leave. i'm sure they won't go starving out this mess. Oh, the pain they must go through. Compared to the minimal pain felt by those who are just simple workers with families to support and no savings.
this is not bad luck. it's mismanagement of such proportions it's criminal. The car guys always claimed their business was different, so if you were not one of them, you needn't apply. That it was also a business that was totally removed from reality is therefore no surprise. they lived in their bubble world. Too dumb, or more likely, too arrogant, to see reality.