Colinito wrote:Yeah, auto's soft right now.
It's worst than soft. 18 months from now I expect either Ford or GM will have declared bankruptcy. Wouldn't rule the possibly of both happening. They both have very shaky balance sheets, can't raise capital and have been absorbing huge losses for some time now. That can't go on for too much longer. The burn rate at Ford is actually worse than it is at GM.
GM missed the boat on spinning off GMAC. That segment of their business could have fetched a nice price about six months ago. But with the rise in gas prices their lease paper isn't looking all that good right now. They have tons of paper on those big SUVs and when they come off lease their book values are going to be nowhere close to their market value.
Both Ford and GM were making huge profit margins on their SUVs. They have to sell three mid-sized cars to generate the same profits as one SUV. It was just too tempting for them to go for the low hanging fruit. Now the race is on to convert their production lines to more fuel efficient models. That takes time and money and both of those commodities are in short supply with both Ford and GM.
We'll be looking at testing the 'too big to fail' mentality pretty soon. Are the taxpayers going to bail them out?