For all Obama’s grandstanding on the automakers, I wonder what the administration hopes to accomplish. It is hard to look at GM’s numbers and not sense inevitability. In 2008 GM lost $30.9 billion, or roughly Kenya’s nominal GDP. It also has $86 billion in negative equity. In other words, if all 153 million people in Bangladesh sent along a year’s worth of their production to GM right now, GM’s creditors would still be about $3 billion away from breaking even on the deal.
