Gmasdre

Today's debate about General Motors is no longer about whether the company should go into bankruptcy but rather who should take the biggest hit in the process, and in what form should GM re-emerge. The "good bank-bad bank" idea is now being recycled as the "Good GM-Bad GM" solution. The idea is to sell stock in Good GM and use the money to induce the creditors in Bad GM to take a large haircut, including some stock in Good GM. If you're a creditor that may be a tall order, so you want to look at how much value would be in Good GM to see how much you might get from taking a big write-off on your loans to Bad GM. You might even want someone to do an intelligent SWOT analysis of Good GM, to assess your risk/reward chances. According to Gene Siciliano, Founder and President of Western Management Associates, it might look like this:

* Strengths: A long track record of building cars and trucks for buyers worldwide. The capacity to build a lot of cars and trucks. A work force that is in place and ready to work.

* Weaknesses: They don't build very good cars and trucks, if reliability is what you want. They tend to build many more cars and trucks, mostly trucks, than people want to buy. They don't seem to realize it, because they do it year after year. They pay their workers well for building cars and trucks that seem to break a lot, compared to the competition.

* Opportunities: They have the opportunity to free themselves of costly labor contracts and replace them with contracts that will better enable them to build better cars and trucks at lower cost. They could even engineer their cars and trucks to hold up better than the old ones, if they wanted to do that.

* Threats: Their long standing inability to fix their weaknesses has resulted in a big competitor taking over their vaunted position as the top gun in cars and trucks, perhaps forever. They will need another claim to fame going forward, like great cars that last, for example.

"This...