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Politics : Sioux Nation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: altair19 who wrote (161831)	2/26/2009 11:15:28 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 362456

GM’s Wagoner Meets With Auto Panel for Six Hours (Update2) By John Hughes Feb. 26 (Bloomberg) -- General Motors Corp. Chief Executive Officer Rick Wagoner pressed his case for as much as $16.6 billion in U.S. aid to a White House auto task force in a session that ran almost six hours, according to a person familiar with the matter. Meeting today for the first time with a panel of government officials and advisers that has the authority to push the biggest U.S. automaker into bankruptcy, Wagoner, Chief Financial Officer Ray Young and Chief Operating Officer Fritz Henderson provided additional details of the company’s plans to trim its brands to four and eliminate 47,000 jobs worldwide, according to the person. The task force attendees were led by Ron Bloom and Steven Rattner, according to the person, who requested anonymity because the meeting was private. Bloom, a former Lazard Ltd. vice president, has served as an adviser to the United Steelworkers Union. Rattner was co-founder of the private-equity firm Quadrangle Group LLC. GM also gave its analysis of options for reshuffling its organization, according to the person. In the viability plan the automaker presented to Congress Feb. 17, GM said restructuring out of court is preferable to bankruptcy, which it said would be too costly with a price tag of as much as $100 billion. The GM executives flew via commercial airliner to Washington and drove to the meeting at the Treasury Department in a Chevrolet Malibu hybrid and a Saturn Vue hybrid, said Greg Martin, a company spokesman. Lawmakers had criticized auto executives for flying in corporate jets to hearings last year. Geithner, Summers Absent The GM executives met with the task force after reporting a $30.9 billion annual loss today, the second-biggest in its 100- year history. Full-year sales fell 17 percent, damped by a drop in new-car demand. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, co-leader of the task force, has the power to recall U.S. automaker loans and force a bankruptcy if the companies fail by March 31 to show they can return to profitability. National Economic Council Director Lawrence Summers is also a task force co-leader. Neither Geithner nor Summers was at today’s meeting, the person said. Isaac Baker, a Treasury spokesman, declined to comment. GM said in a statement after the panel session that the gathering “was just the beginning of the hard work ahead for GM and the president’s team. We found a genuine willingness among the task force to understand our business, industry challenges and GM’s restructuring plan.” Earlier today in a Bloomberg Television interview, Young said the task force meeting was to answer questions, not to negotiate. The panel is in “fact-gathering mode,” he said. $2 billion Needed GM has said it needs $2 billion this month to avoid a shutdown. Cash and cash equivalents totaled $14 billion on Dec. 31, down from $27.3 billion a year earlier and approaching the $11 billion minimum GM says it needs to pay bills. The automaker fell 6.7 percent to $2.38 at 4:30 p.m. in New York Stock Exchange Composite trading, the second-biggest decline in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Excluding some expenses, GM reported a fourth-quarter operating loss of $9.65 a share, wider than the $7.46 average loss estimated by analysts surveyed by Bloomberg. So far, President Barack Obama’s team isn’t pushing bankruptcy, Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat, said in an interview Feb. 24. The key is bondholders accepting cuts after the UAW and companies agreed to concessions, Levin said. Detroit-based GM has already received $13.4 billion in loans since December. Chrysler LLC received an initial installment of $4 billion. Chrysler Chief Executive Officer Robert Nardelli, Vice Chairman Tom LaSorda and Chief Financial Officer Ron Kolka met yesterday with the task force in renewing their push for $5 billion in new loans. Chrysler, Fiat Chrysler is in exclusive negotiations with Italy’s Fiat SpA on an alliance, spokesman Stuart Schorr said Feb. 19. The Auburn Hills, Michigan-based company has agreed in principle to trade 35 percent of its equity to Fiat for small-car technology and access to global markets. Chrysler said it wouldn’t get an improvement in cash flow from the Fiat alliance until 2012. “Chrysler is not sustainable with or without Fiat or in any way by itself,” said John Wolkonowicz, an auto analyst at IHS Global Insight in Lexington, Massachusetts. “So if you want to maintain jobs at Chrysler, you roll it into GM and manage an orderly wind down of jobs over several years.” Auto task force members are meeting with U.S. lawmakers, auto executives and industry analysts as they review the viability plans submitted by GM and Cerberus Capital Management LP’s Chrysler, an Obama administration official has said. To contact the reporters on this story: John Hughes in Washington at jhughes5@bloomberg.net Last Updated: February 26, 2009 19:36 EST