I have very little sympathy for private equity firms like Cerebus. They all think they are incredibly smart masters of the universe until there is an economic slowdown.
The ugly truth is globally there are too many cars and trucks being made. I forget the demand numbers but a peak year in America is like 15 million sold while a slow & bad year is 12 million. My guess is we are way below that. The problem is you have Japan, China, Korea as well as European car comapnies plus NA, SA, E Europe, Russia and Australia chruning out probably 30 million cars a year or more. There are too many car companies and cars.
The UAW does not see this. You have to have protectionism to keep em flooding into America which is a horrible “solution.” The weakest die and Chrysler is one of the weakest. The only solution is let em die or get the govt to subsidize them (heavily).
If the wages and expenses get cut they have another decade maybe.
That is not good. We have two Dodge vehicles. The PT Cruiser is really good and the 3/4 ton truck is superb. I hope they stay in business, but maybe another company will buy the truck division.
I always marvel when I watch the Food Network shows about how many gummiworms are produced every day in some factory, or when I watch How It's Made on the Discovery Channel and count 5-6 people total involved in the production of a complex tool. I see all the increases in productivity and I wonder how an increasing population can remain fully employed.
Wouldn't it theoretically be the case that even a consumer driven society would at times be sated enough to draw back on purchasing, or investments in productivity and supply chain management efficiencies get to the point where we just don't need that many workers for the current population? Or at least the work wouldn't be full-time anymore. If government and complex laws didn't suck a large portion of people from productive labor, it would probably have happened long ago.