I have mixed feelings on the whole car bailout situation. I do feel bad for Pontiac as it's an American Staple. The Pontiac Vibe is a nice car but overall, Pontiac is on the senior circuit.

Yes, everyone knew it was coming, but that doesn't make it any less significant. GM may continue to exist, but I doubt it will ever be anything close to what it used to be. A lot of jobs were lost. Pontiac is no more.

For me personally, this signifies the end of cars that I can get into without a shoehorn.

in my town where there are GM factories that over the years have made, oldsmobiles, chevys. etc. this has been big. our city is a pretty big one for factories, Over the years we had Oldsmobile, Fisher body. motor wheel. to name a few. all having to do with cars. two are gone. the gm plant that no longer makes Oldsmobiles have gone through huge layoffs.when the GM employees lose their jobs other businesses that had relied on them as customers near the factories close down. a real domino effect. things are very Bad in Michigan and other states that manufactured GM cars. so yes very significant on many levels. Michigan and other states are hurting big time because of this...

At 91 billion dollars, the bankruptcy of GM was a pretty significant event. But really, they'd been losing money for many years, and manufacturing in America has long been eclipsed as an industry by high finance.

A much more significant event was the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, which was 691 billion. This really speaks to the primacy of the financial sector in the American economy.

Here's a terrific infographic that shows the relative sizes of the biggest bankruptcies.

Readers have known for a long time that GM was in trouble and it wasn't sustainable. . .still, the actual moment was striking.

But it's too big to fail completely even though GM has done almost everything wrong. . .and probably did a few right things far too late. GM (like many domestic auto companies) did not produce comparable small cars that competed with Japanese models, did not build fuel-efficient models with standards that could be sold in some other countries, and for far too long gave us an inferior product at an inflated price.

The union bashing here is strange. No question they're not guiltless, but GM signed those contracts and if they can't live up to them it's the fault of the. . .unions?

Americans en masse hate lessons that slap them in the face. Build fuel-efficient cars that can be sold domestically and internationally that don't fall apart at 105K. Now.

How many billions did we loan/give them? So that we could let them fall into bankruptcy anyway? And how did the American taxpayers fare here? Right. We gave them billions, with a "b", it is now gone, they don't have to repay it, the UAW owns almost 20% of the company they forced into bankruptcy, the bondholders will lose much more than the union fatcats even though they loaned the company money, and rank-and file union members are being laid off by the thousands every week.

Will the American taxpayer receive any money, any benefit from the billions we've "invested" in this now defunct company? Not a dime. Only a liberal democrat president, with a press wiping his fingerprints off the scene of the larceny, could possibly get away with it.

The beneficiaries: (1) the now-fascist US government, seeking control over Americans and their lives, (2) the union management and pension funds, where all the corruption congregates, and (3) the Democrat Party whose candidates the union management endorses without exception. Hope you like your hope . . . there will be no change, except as noted above.

But, you'll have wonderful little shit-box cars that nobody buys today. Except from Ford, who wisely passed on the "bailout" money (some bailout). They'll be able to continue making the type of cars most Americans want, until the Obama administration boxes them into a regulatory corner. What does it take to wake you up?

So... what was all that bailout money for?

Charles Wilson became Secretary of Defense under Ike in 1953. He famously stated something to the effect: "What is good for General Motors is good for America." As the economy of GM has declined, so has the economy of the USA. Read history. It shows that countries that proceed from industry and manufacturing into finance as their main activity swiftly decline into lesser powers. This has already happened to the USA>

The sad fall of GM is largely due to three things: government interference, union greed and management fecklessness. Or say it another way: Big Government, Big Labor, Big Industry.

I have driven lots of GM products in my time and I have two of them now. As GM becomes "Government Motors," I am going to rethink that position.

To have Barack Hussein lecture to me what kind of vehicle I am going to drive tickles my funny bone. I am over 65 and over six feet tall. I am NOT going to squeeze into some roller skate that gets "good" miles. I have enough money to pay for gas.

GM was still in the black in 1975 when the federal governement introduced CAFE standards. Even in 1979, GM was the largest private employer in the US.
It is true- as has been pointed out in so many reviews here- that GM suffered from poor management and bad fiscal practice. The bottom line however, is that government interference and union greed has been slowly running this leviathan to the bottom of the sea for more than 30 years.
RIP GM.

This wasn't just months in the making. It took years for GM to get to this point. I think I've mentioned this before, but there's an old saying, I don't know if it was a marketing slogan or what... "as GM goes, so does America"... Well, if that holds true, it must mean that default on America's debt can't be too far behind too. In fact, given the circumstances, GM's fate may be America's as well after all.

What really started the bloodletting at GM and the other big 3 automakers was the collapse of Lehman Brothers back in September. They issued no-limit commercial credit to big companies which ran a bit low on funds. This effectively amounted to a "super credit card" issued to company's like GM which allowed them to grab all the cash it needed, no strings attached, to meet short term obligations. The issuance of unlimited credit hid the fact that they were incurring debts that they simply couldn't pay. But as long as the credit pipeline flowed, there was no problem. The name for this super credit card? Commercial Paper--short term IOU's or promissory notes that banks and investment houses printed up and sold to investors and companies to pay for short term expenses.

As it turned out, commercial paper didn't just act as a temporary stop gap for cashless corporations. It became a permanent fixture for almost all major corporations whether they needed the cash or not, and they tapped it for nearly 50 years! GM was one of the worst offenders in this category. It allowed corporations to operate year after year, decade after decade with minimum cash and maximum debt, as least until Wall Street collapsed. When Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy, the commercial paper market dried up. Banks, money market funds and other investors refused to buy that commercial paper. The market almost effectively died and companies like GM that relied on financing its operations through short term debt were thrown into the brink of bankruptcy.

The government tried to jump back and revive the market by making all kinds of guarantees, and they did stem the bleeding to an extent. But that doesn't change the fact that most of Corporate America is drowning in debt, nor does it change the fact that the Federal Reserve's and the government's solution to the problem is incurring MORE DEBT to solve the problem!

Even more incredible is the fact that $20 billion worth of taxpayer dollars could not save GM. President Obama did accomplish one thing with GM's bankruptcy: a huge transfer of wealth from GM's lenders (mainly the big Wall Street banks), bondholders, and the taxpayers who financed the bailouts into the hands of UAW and the other big unions which supported Obama in the election. It also puts one of the country's largest companies in the hands of the US government.

The US government will have 60% equity stake in GM, with Canada holding 12%. Almost 3/4th of the company will be government owned. I have extreme reservations with this "government conservatorship", although I believe GM should have filed for bankruptcy some time ago. That represents a huge risk to taxpayers who will be subsidizing the cost of reorganizing GM, not to mention it represents a huge conflict of interest when the government crafts policy on fuel efficiency standards and labor law. It is very well possible that the government might pass legislation that gives GM an unfair advantage over Ford and other automakers. Hence the perils of government ownership.

This only highlights the broader moral hazard of using taxpayer funds to bail out failed corporations. The billions that the government gave to GM to pay off their short term debts over the past 6 months were largely a waste, since they could have just as easily filed for bankruptcy back in November or December, thus saving the taxpayers those billions. Bankruptcy filings after all are not uncommon among large international corporations and allow the company to get their financial affairs in order and emerge stronger and more competitive.

Most troubling is the government's lack of an announced plan to hold its equity for a short period of time and then sell their shares to the highest bidder. It sounds as if the government is stuck owning these shares well into the foreseeable future. There may also be an effect of suppressing competition within the auto industry with the US government holding a majority stake in GM.

The government's direct ownership of a major US corporation is really unprecedented and a highly troubling development that can only weaken the principles of free markets.

This was obvious. They were going downhill fast, and they were hardly selling any cars. Although, they had no creativity when creating new cars, and they would have 5 differnt GM companys selling one car, just naming it something differnt.Constantly going to Washington and asking for extra moneywas not helping, either. Hopefully some other company will buy them, cause that is the only thing I can see that would get them out of bankruptcy.

This probably should have happened a while back.

I have major concerns about the government owning 60% of GM, and have not seen any evidence of a plan for how this ownership will be sold back to the private sector. I'm with the Republicans on this one - the government has no business being the majority shareholder of a multinational corporation.