June 1, 2009 - General Motors, New York NY

GM files for bankruptcy protection

Bankrupt G.M. Says It Owes $172 Billion

Download a copy of GM's bankruptcy petition - PDF

General Motors filed for bankruptcy on Monday morning, submitting its reorganization papers to a federal clerk in Lower Manhattan.

The bankruptcy of a once-proud auto giant that helped to define the nation’s car culture and played a part in creating the American middle class immediately rippled across the country.

Auto workers braced for news about their jobs as G.M. said it would shutter plants in Michigan, Indiana, Ohio and Delaware, and plants in Tennessee and elsewhere in Michigan were put on standby. In financial markets, shares of foreign automakers and Ford surged ahead. And in Washington, President Obama planned to address G.M.’s bankruptcy in a speech around noon.

In its bankruptcy petition, G.M. said it had $82.3 billion in assets and $172.8 billion in debts. Its largest creditors were the Wilmington Trust Company, representing a group of bondholders holding $22.8 billion in debts, and affiliates of the United Auto Workers union, representing nearly $20.6 billion in employee obligations.

The company was forced into the filing by President Obama, who is betting that by temporarily nationalizing the onetime icon of American capitalism, he can save at least a diminished automaker that is competitive.

With the filing, G.M. follows its crosstown rival Chrysler in bankruptcy. And G.M. hopes that it can move as swiftly in its reorganization. Chrysler, which sought court protection on April 30, could emerge in the next few days; a bankruptcy judge in New York gave approval on Sunday night for most of its assets to be acquired by Fiat, a decision that President Obama hailed on Monday morning.

“Chrysler has a new lease on life,” Mr. Obama said in a statement. “We said this process would be completed quickly and efficiently, and that’s exactly what has been accomplished today.”

The bankruptcy of General Motors culminates a remarkable four months of confrontation between Washington and Detroit that is expected to result in a drastic downsizing of the company. It also places the government in uncharted territory as a business owner, as it takes a majority ownership stake in the company during its restructuring.

The company’s Saturn unit, which G.M. began in 1990 to compete with foreign-made cars, also filed for bankruptcy on Monday. G.M. has said it would phase out the Saturn brand by 2012.

G.M.’s Saab unit is already under bankruptcy protection in Sweden. The German government last week picked Magna International, a Canadian car-parts maker, to buy G.M.’s Opel unit, which is based in Germany.

Reflecting the government’s extraordinary intervention in industry, aides say, Mr. Obama plans to tell the nation later Monday morning that he believes G.M. can be brought back from the brink of insolvency, even if the company looks almost nothing like the titan of old.

Administration officials briefed reporters on Sunday night, as President Obama began to inform members of Congress. But the White House insisted that the aides who talked to reporters could not be named.

In his remarks on Monday, Mr. Obama will spell out a strategy in which a shrunken G.M. can make money even if new car sales remain at a sluggish 10 million a year in the United States and even if G.M., once the giant of the industry, drops below its current 20 percent market share in this country.

But to get there, American taxpayers will invest an additional $30 billion in the company, atop $20 billion already spent just to keep it solvent as the company bled cash as quickly as Washington could inject it. Whether that investment will ever be recovered is still an open question.

The company will also have to shed 21,000 union workers and close 12 to 20 factories, steps that most analysts thought could never be pushed through by a Democratic president allied with organized labor.

Forty percent of the company’s 6,000 dealers will close, the workers’ union will be forced to finance half of its $20 billion health care fund with stock of uncertain value in the restructured G.M., and bondholders, including many retirees, will be forced to take stock worth 10 cents for every dollar they lent the company.

G.M. will also lose its spot on the Dow Jones industrial average, a key stock-market gauge of 30 blue-chip stocks. The car maker had been a member of the closely watched stock index since 1925.Judge Robert E. Gerber of the United States Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan will oversee the bankruptcy. He was appointed in 2000, and oversaw the bankruptcy of the cable company Adelphia.

Before that, he was a partner in the Manhattan firm of Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson, which he joined in 1971 after graduating for Columbia Law School. He specialized in securities and commercial litigation and, thereafter, bankruptcy litigation and counseling.

The company’s last steps toward bankruptcy took place over the weekend as a majority of G.M. bondholders agreed not to challenge the filing in court and to exchange their debt for stock.

To assist in the restructuring, the automaker is expected to hire the consulting firm Alix Partners, which has worked on several major bankruptcies, including those for Enron and Kmart. One of the firm’s partners, Al Koch, is expected to manage the liquidation of corporate assets that G.M. will shed during its Chapter 11 restructuring, people with knowledge of the bankruptcy strategy said.

Mr. Obama is taking several risks under the plan. None may be bigger than the decision that the United States government will take a 60 percent share of the stock in a new G.M., leaving taxpayers vulnerable if the overhaul is not successful. (Canada, for its part, is taking a 12 percent stake.)

“We don’t think that after this next $30 billion, they will need more money,” one senior administration official said. “But the fact is there are things you don’t know — like when the car market will come back, and how much Toyota and Honda and Volkswagen will benefit from the chaos.”

The administration said it had concluded that if Washington just kept lending money to G.M., loading it with debt, the company would be unable to both invest in its business and pay back the loans.

Mr. Obama is expected to argue later Monday that any alternative to his plan would be worse, and that a liquidation of G.M. — the only other real option — would send the unemployment rate soaring over 10 percent and would radiate damage throughout the economy.

But aware of the hardships the plan will impose on regions across the country that depend on auto production, the White House is dispatching a dozen Cabinet members and other officials across four states this week to reassure residents.

Aides say Mr. Obama will portray himself as a reluctant shareholder, eager to sell the company back to private investors, perhaps within 6 to 18 months.

However, in talking to reporters on Sunday evening, a senior administration official acknowledged that there was “an inevitable tension” between the desire to return the company to private hands quickly, and the assumption that the government might be more likely to recover its $50 billion investment in the company if it held onto the stock for an extended period.

Officials say the president will insist that once the government sets up new management and a board, it will remove itself from G.M.’s day-to-day operations. But even his aides anticipate intense pressure as the company’s managers are called to testify in Congress and face questions like why they decided to build new cars in Mexico and South Korea, rather than in Michigan or the South.

“Congress and many Americans are going to say, if we own it, why can’t we make these decisions?” one of Mr. Obama’s top economic aides said, “and it’s going to be a challenge to answer that.”

To ease the way, the White House on Sunday briefed reporters on a new set of principles for how the government should behave as a majority shareholder. It argued that the government’s role should be limited primarily to the beginning of the process, but that it should then recede, becoming a passive investor, one seeking to sell its stake quickly.

At the same time, Mr. Obama has laid out goals for all the Detroit automakers that will presumably affect their major strategic decisions. He has urged them, for example, to build smaller cars with significantly better fuel efficiency. But under the new principles, the White House would be discouraged from getting involved in G.M’s decisions about when and where to build such a car, or how long to keep producing it if it sells poorly.

Six months ago, even the suggestion of such deep intervention into G.M.’s operations would have raised huge objections. But by the time the denouement came, the company seemed almost relieved. Robert Lutz, G.M.’s vice chairman, said that “for the first time in our history, the American auto industry has the ear of the administration. Their number one goal is to make us successful.”

Nonetheless, Michael Useem, a professor of management at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, said the decision would “mean a new chapter in the history books on American capitalism.” He added, “How we think about American free enterprise is really hanging in the balance.”

For Mr. Obama, whose ascent to the White House depended on carrying states across the industrial Midwest, the political risk is significant.

The G.M. bankruptcy will ripple across several states where hundreds of parts suppliers and car dealerships face imminent closings.

Indeed, the four states where Cabinet secretaries are focusing their efforts this week — Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin — all were carried by Mr. Obama last November. It was the first time Indiana has supported a Democratic presidential candidate in 44 years.

These Main Street political challenges will almost certainly be an issue for Democrats on the ballot in next year’s midterm election campaign and in the president’s own re-election effort in 2012. If those jobs shift to nonunion plants in the South, where German and Japanese carmakers have built their facilities, or overseas, Mr. Obama could face criticism inside his own party.

“It is unacceptable to ask U.S. workers to subsidize the exportation of their own jobs,” said Representative Dennis Kucinich, Democrat of Ohio, whose district includes Cleveland. “The taxpayers’ investment should be used to protect American plants so that American workers can build the next generation of automobiles.”

In his presidential campaign speeches last year, often delivered in the shadow of closed manufacturing plans, Mr. Obama bluntly conceded that most of the jobs would not come back. Instead, his administration is pointing to investments that the economic recovery act will make in communities.

Rob McNabney, chairman of the Madison County Democratic Party in Anderson, Ind., a onetime booming automotive center, said the problems for Mr. Obama were severe. “He’s going to be judged by what he does,” Mr. McNabney said.

Tom Henry, the mayor of Fort Wayne, Ind., one of the many places hit hard by the automotive restructuring, said he was optimistic that the town’s truck plant would stay open, but he acknowledged that that suppliers and dealers would suffer.

“There is no question much is on the shoulders of our president,” Mr. Henry, who supported Mr. Obama’s campaign, said in an e-mail message on Sunday. “He is daring to risk more than others. He should be given time to produce.”

Original Story - New York Times

Related Story - June 1, 2009

G.M. Designates 14 Plants for Closing

General Motors said Monday that it would close 14 plants, including seven in Michigan, as part of its restructuring in bankruptcy.

The plants being closed include an engine factory in Ypsilanti, Mich., where 42,000 workers built B-24 bombers during World War II, and the former Saturn assembly plant in Spring Hill, Tenn., that used to invite thousands of car buyers to “homecoming” celebrations.

The Spring Hill plant, along with an assembly plant in Orion, Mich., and a nearby metal-stamping plant, will be placed on “standby” this fall, meaning that they could reopen if needed to support an increase in vehicle demand. One of the two assembly plants on standby is expected to be retooled so that it can build up to 160,000 small cars a year, though no date was given for that to occur.

G.M. said it will close a plant that builds convertibles in Wilmington, Del., next month and a pickup truck plant in Pontiac, Mich., in October. The metal-stamping and powertrain plants on the list, with the exception of two that already had been announced, will close after June 2010.

In addition to the 14 plants, three parts distribution warehouses — in Boston; Jacksonville, Fla.; and Columbus, Ohio — will close in December.

The closings will leave G.M. with 33 plants in the United States by 2012, down from 47 last year. G.M. is cutting about 21,800 hourly jobs by 2011, though it did not say how many people currently work at the plants being closed.

G.M. said it will reach “full capacity utilization of its assembly operations” in 2011, two years sooner than called for in the restructuring plan it filed with the federal government in February.

“Our manufacturing operations, which already are among the most productive in the industry, will emerge even leaner, stronger and more flexible, as part of the New G.M.,” Gary Cowger, G.M.’s group vice president for global manufacturing and labor relations, said in a statement. “Flexible manufacturing enables us to quickly respond to consumer preferences and changing market conditions.”