Rumors In the Car Business

Who's going to buy their cars?


???

Who's going to buy their cars now? Everyone has pulled back on spending?

or if they were bailed out? Bail outs will still lead to layoffs, there will be no protection for employees....?

Care
 
chapter 11 would FORCE them in to focussing on what makes them money, and get rid of this ''throw what you got against the wall and see what sticks'' approach....imo.
 
???

Who's going to buy their cars now? Everyone has pulled back on spending?

or if they were bailed out? Bail outs will still lead to layoffs, there will be no protection for employees....?

Care

If the Big 3 go under and all those people lose their jobs and take massive pay cuts, that's going to screw the entire economy.

We need the Big 3 to be successful. Even if it means kick Toyota and Honda out of America.

Or China/Japan have to take more of our exports.

Something has to change. But bankruptsy and renigging on all those pensions? Not an option. Then the government has to take on those pensions? We can't afford it.

It'd be better to loan the Big 3 the money they need but insist they stop doing business as usual.

We need line workers making good money. This economy where everyone makes $15 an hour is not good for any of us. If it hasn't affected you yet, just wait and see.

Most of us wouldn't be making what we make today if it weren't for the unions. And we're not even in unions!!!

That's why giving the Big 3 a bailout and letting them go about business as usual can not happen. They must get lean and mean. But no more cutting hourly employees numbers or wages. We need those people. We can do without a couple of VP's. This is the same shit as the Bush tax breaks. If 95% of us are doing well, the economy does well. When only 5% of us are doing well, the economy tanks.

We need to get rid of the people who put the Big 3 in this mess. That's the CEO's and Board of Directors. Same with AIG. The people who are living lavishly while the company goes belly up.

The Republicans, along with Corporate America, used NAFTA and FREE TRADE to do this to the Big 3. They don't give a fuck about the Big 3. It'd be ok for them if they broke the unions and the Big 3 went under and started over again, but only this time without unions and only pay people $15 an hour.

That's unacceptable.
 
chapter 11 would FORCE them in to focussing on what makes them money, and get rid of this ''throw what you got against the wall and see what sticks'' approach....imo.

Chapter 11 is exactly what the CEO's want. Then they can write off all those pensions they promised.

Union workers gave up immediate pay raises for pensions. The Big 3 promised Pensions because those were future costs. Better to promise something in the future than have to give something now.

OMG, the more I remember, the more I get mad about this bullshit. Back in 05 or 06, Bush passed the Pension Protection Act. It said that companies could spend their pension funds because we were in a recession and of course the Republicans only know how to spend/borrow their way out of a financial mess.

Thank God the Democrats won this election. If they didn't, the Big 3 would just go bankrupt and start over again, only all the employees and retirees would be FUCKED!!!

Care, I think you need to rethink your tough stance. I don't think you realize what you are saying. Do you really want tax payers to start paying for all those pensions/retirees? Do you really want the big wigs at the big 3 to get to wipe the slate clean and start over and continue paying themselves millions of dollars a year while they lower the line workers wages and take away his healthcare benefits? I didn't know you got conservative all of the sudden.
 
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Chapter 11 is exactly what the CEO's want. Then they can write off all those pensions they promised.

Union workers gave up immediate pay raises for pensions. The Big 3 promised Pensions because those were future costs. Better to promise something in the future than have to give something now.

OMG, the more I remember, the more I get mad about this bullshit. Back in 05 or 06, Bush passed the Pension Protection Act. It said that companies could spend their pension funds because we were in a recession and of course the Republicans only know how to spend/borrow their way out of a financial mess.

Thank God the Democrats won this election. If they didn't, the Big 3 would just go bankrupt and start over again, only all the employees and retirees would be FUCKED!!!

Care, I think you need to rethink your tough stance. I don't think you realize what you are saying. Do you really want tax payers to start paying for all those pensions/retirees? Do you really want the big wigs at the big 3 to get to wipe the slate clean and start over and continue paying themselves millions of dollars a year while they lower the line workers wages and take away his healthcare benefits? I didn't know you got conservative all of the sudden.

It's not the pensions as much as the employee and (especialy) retiree medical. Somthing that only American companies need to pay for.
 
I'd buy a new American car tomorrow if I could afford it.

I don't really need one, and lord knows I cannot afford one, but if I had the dough I'd put some of it back into the economy.

The multibillionaires ought to start spending money here in the USA like crazy.

Lord knows they're the only people who've got it to spend.
 
I'd buy a new American car tomorrow if I could afford it.

I don't really need one, and lord knows I cannot afford one, but if I had the dough I'd put some of it back into the economy.

The multibillionaires ought to start spending money here in the USA like crazy.

Lord knows they're the only people who've got it to spend.

Those multibillionaires aren't soclialists who are gonna redistribute the wealth there, Mr. Obama! What are you a marxist!:lol:
 
well, i didn't lose my pension due from the corporation that declared chapter 11 bankruptcy that i worked for, i can still draw on it when i reach 55.

i don't think we should have to pay for the airline's employee medical or pension. this is what you are asking us americans to do with a bailout, no?

either way, they file chapter 11 restructuring and the gvt picks up the pensions as you state sealy or you hand them the 50 billion bail out and, the gvt is picking up the pensions...it's a lose lose, for us tax payers when it comes to that, no?
 
It's not the pensions as much as the employee and (especialy) retiree medical. Somthing that only American companies need to pay for.

No, it's the Pensions, which include medical. But they got to pay those pensions as promised to those people. Cut the CEO's pay in half before you even think of touching pensions. And it's not just the CEO. It's the VP's under him, then the white collar under them, then the white collar under them, etc. It's happening at every corporation, not just the Big 3. Exec's told the employees they couldn't pay more because the economy was bad, and they started paying US less and then the profits came and we noticed the white collar started giving themselves bonus' for moving jobs overseas.

It's a long story, and I don't want to bore you. My brother is a VP. Do you know what they call this? It's called, "RULE #1. FEED THE GENERALS FIRST AND RULE #2, NEVER FORGET RULE NUMBER ONE".

That is literally the attitude. When they say they can't afford to pay you more because if they do, prices will go up to the consumer, and you buy that bullshit, but then you see the CEO gave himself a $5 million dollar raise, and the senior management goes on $400k party binged, stop being a house slave!


The $35 hr employees did not take down the Big 3, just like poor people didn't crash the economy thru freddy and fannie.

Ford was profitable in the 90's, even with people making $35 hr.

Democrats say they want to fix the out of control healthcare costs.

Maybe they can take this off their plates.

The executives decided to keep making SUV's when gas was $4 a gallon?

It's almost like they are trying to bankrupt themselves. My brother tells me what happens to a company when they go bankrupt. Nothing happens. And the big wigs keep making bank. But they cut from us? And now no one is buying cars because there are no more people making the kind of money you need to make to buy a new car. And all the people who didn't work for the big 3 but made money off the big 3? They are doomed.

So we should let the Big 3 just die. Just buy honda and toyota. Let all the profits go overseas. They own us! Don't you see that?

Instead of demanding that the Big 3 make cars you want, you defend paying employees less money? What a house slave. It must not affect you. Where do you live? What do you do?
 
Chapter 11 is exactly what the CEO's want. Then they can write off all those pensions they promised.

Trust me on this, Chapter 11 is exactly what the corporate officers and directors don’t want. The majority of Officer & Director compensation is paid in the form of Equity which becomes worthless in reorganization. Under a Cpt 11 William Clay Ford will personally lose about $20M, while Mulally $28M. In addition, the Ford Supplemental Executive Retirement Plans are funded through what are called “Rabbi Trusts” which are considered assets subject to creditor claims in a Chapter 11.

Union workers gave up immediate pay raises for pensions. The Big 3 promised Pensions because those were future costs. Better to promise something in the future than have to give something now.

Unlike the Officers, the pensions of the workers are guaranteed by the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation and any renegotiation would leave current plan assets intact. What they would do is probably adjust the actuarial assumptions in the plan for calculating the benefit so that the annual funding requirements would be easier to meet.

The PPA of 2006 was set up because businesses were overfunding their retirement plans. How a defined Benefit plan works is that there is a calculation of how much it will cost today to provide an employee with benefit $X in the future. What happened in the 90’s and 00’s was that the assets in the plan were growing at say 7.5% while the actuarial assumption calculated in the 60’s or 70’s provided a rate of 3%.

What happened was that there were all these old union negotiated contract plans that had accumulated more assets than were required to pay benefit costs required based on a 7.5% growth rate. Excess pension contributions are penalized under the pre PPA so that companies would be forced to over contribute due to the collective bargaining agreement (or be in violation of ERISA) and then pay IRS penalties and excise taxes on the excess contribution.

Of course 2 years after the PPA gets passed our equity markets are in the toilet so the assets funding the pension plan drop and now the plan goes from being over funded to underfunded almost overnight.

The big 3 need to be able to renegotiate the contracts given a reasonable rate of return (like the long term AFR IMHO) so that the plans do not become so overfunded during a boom cycle. This has nothing to do with the benefit or pension payments made to employees, it has to do with the assumptions used to calculate the required contributions.

OMG, the more I remember, the more I get mad about this bullshit. Back in 05 or 06, Bush passed the Pension Protection Act. It said that companies could spend their pension funds because we were in a recession and of course the Republicans only know how to spend/borrow their way out of a financial mess.
The PPA only allowed employers to pull assets out of plans that were funded at a 120% rate or higher so that they could avoid the IRS imposed penalties. One of the big corporate deduction tricks is overfunding your pension plan when you have profits. As contributions to a qualified pension plan can be deducted on the 1120, if a company had a taxable profit at the end of the year they could just throw it into the pension trust as the excise tax for an over contribution was less than the corporate marginal rate. The plan is then over funded so in a lean year the corporation could avoid plan contributions as it was overfunded to begin with.

Thank God the Democrats won this election. If they didn't, the Big 3 would just go bankrupt and start over again, only all the employees and retirees would be FUCKED!!!

Care, I think you need to rethink your tough stance. I don't think you realize what you are saying. Do you really want tax payers to start paying for all those pensions/retirees? Do you really want the big wigs at the big 3 to get to wipe the slate clean and start over and continue paying themselves millions of dollars a year while they lower the line workers wages and take away his healthcare benefits? I didn't know you got conservative all of the sudden.


Don’t buy the line of BS FoMoCo’s officers and directors are selling, they want a bailout to save their Executive Pensions and equity holdings, not to avoid layoffs. Layoffs are inevitable at this point and that sucks, but what would suck more is using tax dollars to fund the executive pension and stock purchase plans.

Obviously they will not tell the American public that the reason for the bailout is to save the top .1% of FoMoCo’s employees & contractors from loosing hundreds of millions of dollars, but that’s what they are in fact pitching for.
 
Trust me on this, Chapter 11 is exactly what the corporate officers and directors don’t want. The majority of Officer & Director compensation is paid in the form of Equity which becomes worthless in reorganization. Under a Cpt 11 William Clay Ford will personally lose about $20M, while Mulally $28M. In addition, the Ford Supplemental Executive Retirement Plans are funded through what are called “Rabbi Trusts” which are considered assets subject to creditor claims in a Chapter 11.



Unlike the Officers, the pensions of the workers are guaranteed by the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation and any renegotiation would leave current plan assets intact. What they would do is probably adjust the actuarial assumptions in the plan for calculating the benefit so that the annual funding requirements would be easier to meet.

The PPA of 2006 was set up because businesses were overfunding their retirement plans. How a defined Benefit plan works is that there is a calculation of how much it will cost today to provide an employee with benefit $X in the future. What happened in the 90’s and 00’s was that the assets in the plan were growing at say 7.5% while the actuarial assumption calculated in the 60’s or 70’s provided a rate of 3%.

What happened was that there were all these old union negotiated contract plans that had accumulated more assets than were required to pay benefit costs required based on a 7.5% growth rate. Excess pension contributions are penalized under the pre PPA so that companies would be forced to over contribute due to the collective bargaining agreement (or be in violation of ERISA) and then pay IRS penalties and excise taxes on the excess contribution.

Of course 2 years after the PPA gets passed our equity markets are in the toilet so the assets funding the pension plan drop and now the plan goes from being over funded to underfunded almost overnight.

The big 3 need to be able to renegotiate the contracts given a reasonable rate of return (like the long term AFR IMHO) so that the plans do not become so overfunded during a boom cycle. This has nothing to do with the benefit or pension payments made to employees, it has to do with the assumptions used to calculate the required contributions.


The PPA only allowed employers to pull assets out of plans that were funded at a 120% rate or higher so that they could avoid the IRS imposed penalties. One of the big corporate deduction tricks is overfunding your pension plan when you have profits. As contributions to a qualified pension plan can be deducted on the 1120, if a company had a taxable profit at the end of the year they could just throw it into the pension trust as the excise tax for an over contribution was less than the corporate marginal rate. The plan is then over funded so in a lean year the corporation could avoid plan contributions as it was overfunded to begin with.




Don’t buy the line of BS FoMoCo’s officers and directors are selling, they want a bailout to save their Executive Pensions and equity holdings, not to avoid layoffs. Layoffs are inevitable at this point and that sucks, but what would suck more is using tax dollars to fund the executive pension and stock purchase plans.

Obviously they will not tell the American public that the reason for the bailout is to save the top .1% of FoMoCo’s employees & contractors from loosing hundreds of millions of dollars, but that’s what they are in fact pitching for.

I hope you are right.

I just worry, and it seems like, the executives are bankrupting their own companies. Selling out. Going overseas. Telling the employees they can't afford anything and yet every year they approve their own pay raises.

So Ford would lose billions? How much would he save by not having to pay all those pensions?

If we give the Big 3 any money, it has to be on our conditions. Otherwise, go get a traditional loan.

And the government's number one concern is the economy, which means NOT laying off massive amounts of Americans. It means not going to Mexico to save on labor costs.

And I believe we also need to deal with the countries Honda & Toyota come from. Make trade fair.

Again, I hope you are right. I'm just telling you what it looks like to me. I don't know anything. Thanks for the information.
 
Trust me on this, Chapter 11 is exactly what the corporate officers and directors don’t want. The majority of Officer & Director compensation is paid in the form of Equity which becomes worthless in reorganization. Under a Cpt 11 William Clay Ford will personally lose about $20M, while Mulally $28M. In addition, the Ford Supplemental Executive Retirement Plans are funded through what are called “Rabbi Trusts” which are considered assets subject to creditor claims in a Chapter 11.



Unlike the Officers, the pensions of the workers are guaranteed by the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation and any renegotiation would leave current plan assets intact. What they would do is probably adjust the actuarial assumptions in the plan for calculating the benefit so that the annual funding requirements would be easier to meet.

The PPA of 2006 was set up because businesses were overfunding their retirement plans. How a defined Benefit plan works is that there is a calculation of how much it will cost today to provide an employee with benefit $X in the future. What happened in the 90’s and 00’s was that the assets in the plan were growing at say 7.5% while the actuarial assumption calculated in the 60’s or 70’s provided a rate of 3%.

What happened was that there were all these old union negotiated contract plans that had accumulated more assets than were required to pay benefit costs required based on a 7.5% growth rate. Excess pension contributions are penalized under the pre PPA so that companies would be forced to over contribute due to the collective bargaining agreement (or be in violation of ERISA) and then pay IRS penalties and excise taxes on the excess contribution.

Of course 2 years after the PPA gets passed our equity markets are in the toilet so the assets funding the pension plan drop and now the plan goes from being over funded to underfunded almost overnight.

The big 3 need to be able to renegotiate the contracts given a reasonable rate of return (like the long term AFR IMHO) so that the plans do not become so overfunded during a boom cycle. This has nothing to do with the benefit or pension payments made to employees, it has to do with the assumptions used to calculate the required contributions.


The PPA only allowed employers to pull assets out of plans that were funded at a 120% rate or higher so that they could avoid the IRS imposed penalties. One of the big corporate deduction tricks is overfunding your pension plan when you have profits. As contributions to a qualified pension plan can be deducted on the 1120, if a company had a taxable profit at the end of the year they could just throw it into the pension trust as the excise tax for an over contribution was less than the corporate marginal rate. The plan is then over funded so in a lean year the corporation could avoid plan contributions as it was overfunded to begin with.




Don’t buy the line of BS FoMoCo’s officers and directors are selling, they want a bailout to save their Executive Pensions and equity holdings, not to avoid layoffs. Layoffs are inevitable at this point and that sucks, but what would suck more is using tax dollars to fund the executive pension and stock purchase plans.

Obviously they will not tell the American public that the reason for the bailout is to save the top .1% of FoMoCo’s employees & contractors from loosing hundreds of millions of dollars, but that’s what they are in fact pitching for.

And I don't argue that new employees should get the same bad deals that our fathers got. I just say honor what they agreed to with my father. The new generation of employees should get good pay, but retirements like our parents got are unrealistic.

So I think the Big 3 just need to get by until our parents die. LOL.

And start building cars people want.
 
And then we will experience the joy of a government-run car industry.

Won't that be peachy.

As opposed to the bliss we've had under Bush's free market?

Does the President make $10 million dollars a year like the CEO of a failing company? GREAT! Then we just saved $9,800,000 right there alone.
 
While we can debate back and forth the merits of Chapter 11 vs. Bailout, it seems pretty clear that congress is bent on giving The Big 3 additional loans to the tune of 25 Billion in an attempt as stated by congress to save Millions of jobs. It does not matter one bit if any of the big 3 get this money as it relates to layoffs as they will happen with or without it. Chapter 11 is not something that any CEO would ever want for their company, however in the case of the Big three in order for them to be competitive once again this will have to come to pass eventually as GM alone will burn through that 25 Billion in no time flat. Pensions in that situation will taken over by the government anyway, and what seems to be lost in all this is that somehow many believe that these companies owe it's employee's a job. In fact they do not owe an employee anything other than the compensation that employee gets for the work they do. I have posted this before, but its worth mentioning it again, the UAW should share some of the blame for the downfall of the Big 3 like it or not, in a more and more competitive world , the UAW is more interested in that raise than they are the survival of the company that pays the wage. Why do you suppose that GM is actually profitable in every other country but the United States? The reason is that GM does not have a high cost built into each unto produced crippling them when they produce a vehicle. The other thing is that GM is able to produce vehicle that are more responsive to the market where those costs do not have to be made up by high cost vehicles like SUV's and big trucks. So go ahead and give the 25 Billion dollar 3 month survival kit and wait for the Chapter 11 three months from now, but consider this, would not that 25 billion be better spent as an unemployment extension benefit for those put out of work by Chapter 11.
 
the UAW is more interested in that raise than they are the survival of the company that pays the wage. Why do you suppose that GM is actually profitable in every other country but the United States? The reason is that GM does not have a high cost built into each unto produced crippling them when they produce a vehicle. The other thing is that GM is able to produce vehicle that are more responsive to the market where those costs do not have to be made up by high cost vehicles like SUV's and big trucks. So go ahead and give the 25 Billion dollar 3 month survival kit and wait for the Chapter 11 three months from now, but consider this, would not that 25 billion be better spent as an unemployment extension benefit for those put out of work by Chapter 11.

The exec's are more worried about their raises and their bonus' than they are about the success of the company too, trust me.

The CEO can go be a CEO for another company. Or he can go be on the BOD of some other company.

Or, he can just go retire with the $5 million dollars he just gave himself.

Did you read the rules? I got that from an insider. Again, rule 1, feed the generals first. Rule 2, don't forget rule number one. That's not a joke.

I'll get details from my VP brother this weekend and post what he tells me on Tuesday. We're going deer hunting. It's a long ride up north and he loves to hear himself talk. LOL. But he's a cool vp. He's actually liberal. BUT, he will probably agree that a company doesn't necessarily want to go bankrupt.

But, he now works for a auto supplier that went bankrupt. His job is to clean house and to make them more efficient. He says walking into the building, or seeing the extravagent lunches they put on, you wouldn't be able to tell that they were in bankruptsy. They are dionosaurs. Doing things like they did 20 years ago. Old farts who don't know how to bring their companies into the 21st century, blabla.

He told me something about what happens to the stocks when a company goes bankrupt. I think the major shareholders are protected. Like, the new companies stock gets set at a pretty high amount to begin with, so all the old stakeholders can recoup.

Ah, I'm talking out of my ass. It was a conversation we had last year. Let me ask him again and I'll try to take notes. LOL.
 
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People who bitch about American union workers don't know that American Manufacturers are going overseas to find that foreign workers in other countries are sometimes an even bigger headache than we are.

In Europe, they shut down one month every summer. How would Ford here in America like to be shut down for one month every summer?

People who blame the unions or defend unfair trade with China because they like the cheap products we get from it, don't know all the negatives that come with it.

And until it happens to them, they probably won't give a damn.

This lowering of worker wages is going to affect all of us.

Sure the cop doesn't think it effects him. I have an arrogant cop friend who can be cocky because he has a pension and it will NEVER be taken away. And he doesn't work nearly as hard as a union worker. No matter how lazy the union factory worker is, no way are they even half as lazy as my cop friend. Most cops are not chasing criminals or risking their lives. They're giving tickets and eating donuts.

Now that i say from the safety of my computer. LOL.
 
The exec's are more worried about their raises and their bonus' than they are about the success of the company too, trust me.

The CEO can go be a CEO for another company. Or he can go be on the BOD of some other company.

Or, he can just go retire with the $5 million dollars he just gave himself.

Did you read the rules? I got that from an insider. Again, rule 1, feed the generals first. Rule 2, don't forget rule number one. That's not a joke.

I'll get details from my VP brother this weekend and post what he tells me on Tuesday. We're going deer hunting. It's a long ride up north and he loves to hear himself talk. LOL. But he's a cool vp. He's actually liberal. BUT, he will probably agree that a company doesn't necessarily want to go bankrupt.

But, he now works for a auto supplier that went bankrupt. His job is to clean house and to make them more efficient. He says walking into the building, or seeing the extravagent lunches they put on, you wouldn't be able to tell that they were in bankruptsy. They are dionosaurs. Doing things like they did 20 years ago. Old farts who don't know how to bring their companies into the 21st century, blabla.

He told me something about what happens to the stocks when a company goes bankrupt. I think the major shareholders are protected. Like, the new companies stock gets set at a pretty high amount to begin with, so all the old stakeholders can recoup.

Ah, I'm talking out of my ass. It was a conversation we had last year. Let me ask him again and I'll try to take notes. LOL.

Seriously sealy, the absolute best thing for Detroit and the Big three IMHO that coould ever happen would be for them to go Chapter 11. While some in the UAW would likely have a fit over this, what would you rather have? 100% of the people working at 85% of the wage or 50% of the people working at 100% of the wage? The bottom line is that it's not the UAW's fault totally for all this, in the end it's the companies for entering into these agreements year after year with them. In short, it's rather two faced for a company to complain about high labor cost due to Unions when they are the ones approving the wage benefits. However, if the Unions really want to survive all this , then it's not very realistic to keep the view that companies like Toyota and Honda and others are unfair when GM, Ford, and Chrysler do the very same things they do. If I were a Union member and my pension was on the line, I would rather have the government take it over in Chapter 11, and give the company some breathing room in order to secure my job.
 

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